How to Disable a WordPress Plugin with FTP

WordPress

In this post, learn how to disable a WordPress plugin with FTP (File Transfer Protocol) & how to add a favicon when you are not able to login to WordPress Dashboard.

Sometimes you need to deactivate a plugin while troubleshooting an issue on your WordPress website. If you’re unable to log in to WordPress, you can disable plugins with FTP. You can use any FTP app, but these steps describe disabling plugins with FileZilla.

  1. Connect to your hosting with FTP.

    FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is a way to move files from your computer to your hosting account and vice versa. To use FTP, you’ll need an FTP client. There are many different clients you can use, but we recommend FileZilla).
  2. In the Remote site section, locate the folder with your WordPress website.
  3. Navigate to the /wp-content/plugins folder.
  4. Select and hold (or right-click) the folder with the plugin you want to disable, and select Rename.
  5. Add the suffix .renamed to the folder name. For example, if you use the Akismet plugin, rename the akismet folder to akismet.renamed. This deactivates the Akismet plugin.Note: If you are investigating an error, continue with steps 6 and 7. If you just want to deactivate a particular plugin, skip to step 9.
  6. Visit or reload your site in a browser in a private browsing mode.
  7. If you still see the error, repeat steps 4,5 and 6 with the next plugin until the site loads correctly. The last plugin you renamed was the one causing the error.
  8. Rename all plugin folders back to their original names except for the one with the faulty plugin.

    Warning: If you sign in to your WordPress dashboard while some plugins are still renamed, do not visit the plugins page within the dashboard. Visiting that page will disable all renamed plugins in the database, so they won’t be enabled automatically after you rename them to their original name. You’ll have to activate the plugins from the WordPress dashboard.
  9. Optional: If you want to deactivate the plugin in the database, leave its folder renamed until you sign in to your WordPress dashboard and visit the plugins page. After that, rename the plugin’s folder to the original name in the FTP app.

Add a favicon for WordPress with FTP

If your WordPress theme does not have an option for installing a favicon, you can use the following steps to manually install one.

  1. Upload the image file that you want to be your favicon to the root of the webspace of your site.

     Note: If you do not have access to the file manager, you will need to use FTP to upload your favicon into the root directory for your website.
  2. Change the name of the file to favicon.ico.

These steps can be reversed. You can name the file locally before uploading it to the hosting account.

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