I recently encountered a problem whereby I became locked out of my own blog, where attempting to access the admin page for WordPress would redirect me to the page I came from.  Apparently this is quite a common (and infuriating) problem with WordPress blogs.  Considering this, I thought I would be able to find a solution a lot quicker than I did.

Most of the advice online falls into one of 2 categories:

  1. Login using [blogroot]/wp-login.php instead.  This is the easiest method to try, as it doesn’t involve changing anything.  Once you’re logged in, you should be able to access your wp-admin dashboard without any problems.  If this doesn’t work, then the next most popular piece of advice seems to be:
  2. Backup and then delete the .htaccess file from your blog root.  .htaccess files are the usual method for managing redirects within WordPress, so this advice makes sense.

It seems that a combination of these methods seems to resolve most peoples’ problems.  However, neither worked for me.

It turned out that the problems that I was having were related to a faulty plugin.  Without access to the dashboard I was unable to disable my plugins, so I had to disable them via FTP instead.  If neither of the above methods work for you, try this:

  1. Login to your website via ftp, and navigate to /wp-content/.
  2. Rename the /plugins/ folder to /plugins-backup/ or similar.  WordPress will be unable to detect them, and will deactivate them.
  3. Attempt to login to WordPress using your usual method.  If your problems were due to a faulty plugin, you should now be able to log in.
  4. Rename your /plugins-backup/ folder back to /plugins/.  Your plugins will remain deactivated on WordPress as a precaution.
  5. You can now reactivate your plugins on WordPress one by one to find out which was the culprit.