Steps to Regain Administrator Privileges After the Person in Charge of a WordPress Site Outsourced to a Production Company Has Resigned or Closed Their Business

Here’s a guide on how to regain administrator privileges after the person in charge of your WordPress site—which you had outsourced to a production company—has resigned or gone out of business.

Unable to Update Plugins, etc., Due to Lack of WordPress Administrator Permissions

When a WordPress development company delivers a site, they may provide the site operator with a user account that only allows editing and adding posts and static pages—to prevent accidental updates or bugs. (This account lacks the permissions to update or add/modify plugins.)

However, it’s common for the development company to go out of business or for the person in charge to leave, making it difficult to log in with stronger permissions (permissions to update WordPress itself, plugins, or themes). This can lead to vulnerabilities being left unaddressed, resulting in malware infections, the inability to use new features, or the inability to update PHP(because the plugins are outdated and do not support the new PHP version).

Enabling Login with Administrator Privileges

In this case, the quickest solution is to upload database access software to the server, manually change the administrator password, and then log in as an administrator.

Upload the PHP program above to the server using an FTP client, access it, and enter the database connection settings stored in WordPress’s `wp-config.php` file to log in to the database.

Open the table with the prefix _users (usually wp_users).
Create a password for the administrator user (typically created by the development company), hash it using MD5, and save it.

This will allow you to log in as this user.

*Generally, the administrator user has an ID of 1. You can verify whether this user actually has administrator privileges by checking the wp_usermeta table for the following entry under user_id 1 (the user’s ID):
wp_capabilities a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}

If you are able to log in to a site that hasn’t been updated for a long time, we also recommend running a malware scan and vulnerability assessment.
[Free] WordPress: Malware Scan & Security Plugin [Malware and Virus Detection and Removal]

What if you still can’t log in with administrator privileges?

If you are unable to log in as an administrator, or if you can log in but cannot update plugins, it may be because code restricting functionality has been added to the theme’s `functions.php` file, or because a permission-restriction plugin is limiting your access.