How to Quickly Deactivate All WordPress Plugins

While troubleshooting a WordPress based website, we have to deactivate all WordPress plugins. If there are too many plugins, we can select all plugins and then use bulk deactivate option. But what if you are not able to login into WordPress. In case some plugin error, sometimes it shows configuration error or white screen of death. At this moment, you cannot use this WordPress dashboard option to deactivate all plugins because of the issue in WordPress login. So, you need a way to troubleshoot.

Ways to Quickly Deactivate All WordPress Plugins

There are two methods which do not need WordPress dashboard access and you can deactivate all plugins. You need to have FTP or phpMyAdmin.

Deactivate All WordPress Plugins Using FTP

In this method, you can either use FTP or cPanel file manager. Just go to /wp-content/ folder and see the folder /plugins/. Rename this folder to anything else. Once you have changed the name of the folder, all your plugins will be deactivated.

If the issue was with your plugins, now you will be able to login into your WordPress dashboard. If you can login now, you can activate plugins one by one to see which plugin is causing the problem. If activating a plugin breaks your website again, you know the culprit.

Deactivate All WordPress Plugins using phpMyAdmin

In this method, you need to open phpMyAdmin from your WordPress hosting. If you do not know how to use phpMYAdmin, we will recommend you to use the FTP method.

In phpMyAdmin, select the database and then go to wp_options table. Here, see the option name “active_plugins”. Change the value of this.

First run this query:

SELECT * FROM wp_options WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

Copy the value of ‘option_value’ column and save it in any text file. This will be something like below

Once you have saved the value, run this query.

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'a:0:{}' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

When you want to reactivate all the plugins, you need to run this query

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'YOUR_COPIED_VALUE' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins';

Here, replace the YOUR_COPIED_VALUE with the value you saved.