How to Disable a WordPress Plugin with FTP

WordPress

In this post, discover how to turn off a WordPress plugin using FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and how to incorporate a favicon when you cannot access the WordPress Dashboard.

There are times when you need to disable a plugin while resolving a problem on your WordPress site. If you’re unable to access WordPress, you can deactivate plugins using FTP. Any FTP client can be used, but the following steps illustrate how to disable 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 lacks a feature for adding a favicon, you can follow these steps to manually set one up.

  1. Place the image file you wish to use as your favicon in the root directory of your website.

     Note: If you cannot access the file manager, you will have to utilize FTP to place your favicon into the root directory of your website.
  2. Change the name of the file to favicon.ico.

You can undo these actions. It’s possible to assign a name to the file on your device prior to uploading it to the hosting account.

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