How to Find Your WordPress Login URL and Successfully Log In

Beginner users interacting with WordPress go through a hard time logging in to their accounts. In this article, I’ll explain how to find your WordPress login URL and a few other essential things that need to be highlighted regarding the login process.

Let’s start from the beginning.

Importance of the WordPress Login

After installing WordPress, you’ll gain access the admin dashboard of your website where you have the opportunity to set up your site as you need and change a few things.

This would be impossible if you had no access to the admin pages. The login page is what keeps you — and others — from accessing the management “side” of your WordPress site.

It is virtually impossible to take full control of your site/blog if you have no access to the admin area.

But where is this WordPress login page located?

How to Find the WordPress Login URL

Finding the WordPress login page is probably more straightforward than you’d expect. On a fresh WordPress installation, adding /admin/ (ex: www.yourawesomesite.com/admin/) or /login/ (ex: www.yourawesomesite.com/login/) at the end your website’s URL will redirect you to the login page.

Usually, these two should directly take you to your WordPress login page. In case this doesn’t happen, there is an additional way to reach your login page: you can add /wp-login.php at the end of the URL, like in this example: www.awesomesite.com/wp-login.php.

How to Find the WordPress Login URL on a Subdirectory or Subdomain

All of this works for a standard and new WordPress installation. But there’s a chance you might have installed WordPress on a subdirectory of your domain such as www.yourawesomesite.com/wordpress/ or a subdomain such as blog.yourawesomesite.com/.

If that’s the case, you’ll need to append one of the aforementioned paths right after the subdirectory/subdomain’s closing slash, i.e. the / symbol, to get something like this:

www.awesomesite.com/wordpress/login/ or www.awesomesite.com/wordpress/wp-login.php.

No matter which one you’re using, each of them should take you to your WordPress login page. If you don’t want to forget about it, just bookmark your preferred URL.

Alternatively, there is a “remember me” option in the WordPress login form, which will allow you to stay logged in and reach the admin dashboard for a few days without the need to log in again (based on how your cookies are set):

The “remember me” option on WordPress login form

Logging in via the WordPress login page is a crucial yet easy task to do. If nothing wrong and/or malicious is happening on your site, you’ll just need your email address/username and your password.

That’s all. Unfortunately, bad guys are everywhere and your site could become a target.

What can you do to discourage them, then?

Let’s move the login page at least!

Where the heck is the #WordPress login page? 😤Follow these tips to easily find your login URL and improve your security at the same time! Click to Tweet

How to Change the WordPress Login Page

Your login page shouldn’t be accessible to hackers and malicious attackers (aka the bad guys) because they might get access to the admin page of your site and start messing things up. Not a good experience to have, trust me!

While using a strong, unique, long password can really play in your favor for preventing unauthorized access to your site, there’s never enough things you could do when security is at stake.

One quick and effective way to keep the bad guys out is to move the WordPress login page to a new unique URL of your choice. Changing the login URL through which you and your users are able to get access to your WordPress site could really help when it comes to fighting random attacks, hacks, and brute force attacks.

One word about brute force attacks: brute force attacks are hacking attempts where the malicious subject tries to guess your username and password repeatedly, exploiting lists of common usernames and passwords that have leaked on the web. What they do is that they try thousands of combinations taking advantage of scripts that automate all of their attempts.

In today’s world, there is a high chance that either your WordPress password or username might be on one of these leaked lists. If you add that WordPress login standard URL is something publicly known to this scenario, well, you’ll get how easy is to gain access to your WordPress site for hackers and malicious attackers.

That’s why moving the WordPress login page to a different path can help you.

Change Your WordPress Login Page with a Plugin

The most common and probably easiest way to change your WordPress login URL page is by using a free plugin like WPS Hide Login, which is actively used by more than 400k users.

WPS Hide Login plugin

Once downloaded and activated, all you need to do is:

1. Click on WPS Hide Login from the Settings tab in your right-hand sidebar.
2. Add your new Login URL path in the Login URL field.
3. Add a specific redirect URL in the Redirection URL. This page will trigger when someone tries to access the standard wp-login.php page and wp-admin directory while not logged in.
4. Hit Save Changes.

WPS Hide Login plugin

Just be aware that, once you click on the Save Changes button, your new login page will become effective, thus your old login URL will no longer work!

An alternative premium plugin you can use to change your login URL is Perfmatters, developed by one of the team members at Kinsta.

As changing your WordPress login URL can help to ward off the shallow attackers from accessing your site, I want to be clear here: expert and professionals hackers could potentially still go the extra mile and figure out your login page anyway.

So, why should you care? Well, security is a layers game (where the quality of your hosting plays a key role): the more tools, tricks, walls you have in place, the harder it’ll be for the bad guys to break into your site and gain control.

Change Your WordPress Login Page Editing Your .htaccess File

Other more technical ways to change or hide the WordPress login page URL is by editing your .htaccess file.

Typically used with cPanel hosts, the .htaccess file’s main role is to configure rules and set up system-wide settings. Since we’re talking about hiding the login page, .htaccess can handle that in two specific ways.

The first one is about password-protecting your login page with a .htpasswd so that anyone reaching your login page will be required to put in a password before accessing the login page. If you’re a Kinsta client, we use Nginx, and therefore there is no .htaccess file. You will need to reach out to our support team and we can easily add this for you.

Basic HTTP authentication

The second option you have is enabling access to your login page based on a list of trusted IP addresses.

How to Fix the Most Common Issues with the WordPress Login

Logging in your WordPress site is a quick and easy task. Yet some users — you? — might have experienced some issues when trying to access their WordPress site. Such issues usually fall under one of the following scenarios:

• Issues related to the password.
• Issues related to cookies.

Let’s have a look at both and see how to address them!

WordPress Login: Password Lost/Forgot

If you’re unable to log in, you might have a problem with your login credentials.

So, the very first thing you should do is checking whether your the username and password entries you’re typing in are actually correct. I know, it sounds lame but you have no idea how frequently we type these mistakenly.

Did it work? If not, you might want to reset your password before trying something else. To do so, click the Lost your password? option right below the login form:

“Lost your password” option

You will be redirected to a page where you will be asked your username/email and a new password will be sent to you:

How to get a new WordPress password

Manually Reset WordPress Password with phpMyAdmin

If this does not work, things will get a bit more complicated as you’ll need to conduct a manual password reset. Please don’t do this if you don’t feel comfortable working with database files.

Manually resetting your WordPress login password can be done by editing the password file on your database. If you have access to phpMyAdmin in your host, this shouldn’t be hard.

Always backup your site before doing any edits to database files in case something goes wrong.

Done? Great!

Step 1

Now, log in to phpMyAdmin.

Step 2

On the left-hand side, click into your database. Then click on the table called wp_users. Then click on “Edit” next to the user login you need to reset.

Edit user in phpMyAdmin

Step 3

In the user_pass column, enter in a new password (it is case-sensitive). In the Function drop-down menu, select MD5. Then click “Go.”

Reset password in phpMyAdmin

Step 4

Test the new password on your login screen.

Manually Reset WordPress Password with WP-CLI

Another way to reset your WordPress password is by using WP-CLI. WP-CLI is a command line tool for developers to manage common tasks (and not so common) of a WordPress installation.

Step 1

First, use the following command to list all of the current users in the WordPress installation.

$ wp user list

Step 2

Then update the user password with the following command, along with the user ID and the new desired password.

$ wp user update 1 --user_pass=strongpasswordgoeshere

Step 3

Test the new password on your login screen.

WordPress Login: Cookies

In some instances, you might not be able to log in due to issues related to cookies. If so, you are usually met with the following error:

Error: Cookies are blocked or not supported by your browser. You must enable cookies to use WordPress.

Cookies are blocked or not supported error

WordPress login relies on cookies to work. If they are disabled or not working correctly, chances are you will have problems on the login page. The first thing to check is that cookies are enabled in your browser:

We often see this on installations of WordPress that have recently been migrated or multisites. Sometimes simply refreshing your browser and trying to login again will actually get you passed this error. You could also try clearing your browser cache or open a different browser in incognito mode.

If none of the above worked, you can try adding the line below to your wp-config.php file, right before /* That's all, stop editing!...*/

define('COOKIE_DOMAIN', false);

If it’s a multisite setup, you might want to check and see if there is a sunrise.php file in the /wp-content/ folder and renamed it to sunrise.php.disabled.  This is a file used by an older domain mapping method. As of WordPress 4.5, multisite no longer requires a plugin to map domains. If you’re a Kinsta client and unsure about this, please reach out to our support team and ask for help.

Summary

Your WordPress login page is the gateway that grants you access to your site. If you aren’t able to log in successfully, you’re just a site visitor.

That’s why you should learn how to reach this key page so that you won’t waste lots of time every time you need to log in to your WordPress site. Want to improve your security a bit? Change the standard WordPress login URL with a custom one of your choice and share that URL only with trusted people!

Source: Kinsta