Bypassing the WP Engine Login Lockout Period…

Do you host with WP Engine? We do! In fact this site is running smoothly on WP Engine!!

WP Engine does a lot of groovy things to make the lives of those hosting with them easier and less worrisome. One such groovy thing is security. They install a nifty plugin called ‘Limit Login Attempts.’ It’s a must-use plugin, which you cannot delete or deactivate. I’m okay with that, as limiting login attempts is just a good practice to begin with as a first line of defense against brute force attacks.

However, sometimes you get locked out of your site because you can’t remember your password; or you recently changed it, it’s the same ol’ story. If that’s you, like it was for me not so long ago, then you gotta wait 20 minutes before you get back in. There’s currently no interface for configuring this plugin, or manually resetting easily with the WP Admin. So, that’s a bit of a bummer.

Pshaw, I say to thee! There’s a simple way to get around this. Again, I urge you to make a backup of your database. I cannot console you if you blow your site up. However, the good news is that you have a daily snapshot you can roll back-in-time to should these worst case scenario happen to you.

That said…

Just follow these wild and crazy steps

1. First, get logged into your site and get to phpmyadmin by going to: https://my.wpengine.com/installs/your-site/phpmyadmin or just go to https://my.wpengine.com, select your install and then click on phpmyadmin
2. Then click on the database wp_your-site-name on the left
   Then go to the table wp_options on the right
3. The option name we’re looking for is: limit_login_lockouts. If you have a large database, I recommend sorting the table by the options names…
4. Once you’ve spotted ‘limit_login_lockouts’ click on the ‘edit’ link
5. Delete the value in the option_value field
   
6. Go back to your login screen and kaboom, you can login