How to deactivate WordPress plugins without accessing WP Admin area

There are several articles on how to deactivate WordPress plugins without accessing WP Admin area but unfortunately most of them do not help when you want to deactivate/disable a single or selected plugins from your WordPress site. Instead if you follow the tutorials you’ll end up deactivating all the plugins in your site and which could lead to a complete mess.

From our point, there is only 1 recommended method of deactivating plugins from your WordPress site when you are unable to access WP admin area of your site.

Rename/Delete it via FTP or Cpanel

  1. Login to your FTP account or Cpanel.
  2. Go to wp-content/plugins folder.
  3. Locate the plugin folder causing issues, note that while most plugin names correspond with their folder names there are some plugins which have completely different folder names, (example : Visual Composer folder is js_composer ) so you need to make sure that you’re disabling the right plugin.
  4. Rename the folder to anything, preferably append .disabled in the folder name so that you know which plugin you’ve disabled.

 

 

Another important point, should you activate the plugin again after disabling it. The answer is “NO“. Several plugins use path variables to loading files and scripts, so once you’ve renamed the folder, please delete the plugin and reinstall it.

 

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