How To Create New Admin User In Wordpress

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Last updated: June 7, 2021 by

One of our users site got hacked and the WP Admin user account password was changed by the hacker. This essentially locked the user out of his admin dashboard. It is best (for situations like this) to just create a new admin user account to gain access to WP admin dashboard and fix things as needed.

In this tutorial I will show you how you can create a new WordPress admin user account via MySQL database (without having access to your WordPress admin dashboard).

Alternatively, you can add a WordPress admin user account via PHP.

Note: You can ONLY do this if you are the site owner. You need to have access to cPanel/Control Panel of your server (comes with your hosting plan). If you don't know the details of your cPanel login then ask your hosting provider.

Step 1) Access Your MySQL Database

Log into your cPanel/Control panel
Go to "Database" section
Click on PHPMyAdmin icon

PHPMyAdmin access

Step 2) Go to the WP Users table

Select your WordPress database from the list of databases in PhpMyAdmin
Go to the WP Users table and click on the "insert" link

wp users database table

Step 3) Insert a New Record in the Users Table

You will need to fill in the following fields to insert a new user record:

ID – Keep the value of this field empty (it will automatically assign the correct value for it)
user_login – insert the username you want to use
user_pass – add a password for the account. Select MD5 in the functions menu (Refer to the screenshot below).
user_nicename – leave this field empty for now
user_email – add the email address you want to use for this account.
user_url – leave this field empty for now
user_registered – select the date/time for when this user is registered.
user_status – set this to 0.
display_name – leave this field empty for now
Click on the Go Button (you should see a success message)

insert a new wp user record screenshot

You can go back to the wp_users table and browser the entries to verify that the user record has been inserted correctly (see screenshot below).

inserted wp user record screenshot

Take note of the value if the "ID" field for this newly created user (we will need this ID field's value for the next step). In this case the ID is 2.

Step 4) Insert User Meta Values

This is the final step where we will assign some user meta values to the user account we just created.

Go to the "wp_usermeta" table and click on the "insert" link:

wp usermeta table screenshot

Use the following values and click the "Go" button to insert the usermeta data

umeta_id – Leave it blank (it will be generated for you)
user_id – This is the ID of the user we created in the previous step. For our case it is 2.
meta_key – Use wp_capabilities
meta_value – Use the following value for this field:

a:1:{s:13:"administrator";s:1:"1";}

See screenshot below

wp usermeta data screenshot

All done!

You can now log into your WP site using this newly created WP User account. You can use this account to change the password and role of your other user accounts or delete them (if you want to).

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