In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to deactivate a WordPress plugin via FTP.

This quick guide walks you through fixing a WordPress site that’s stuck in maintenance mode. This problem shows up as both the front-end and admin area of your site displaying nothing but “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

A member from the WPShout Facebook Group blew my mind last week with this set of instructions for either resetting WordPress user passwords or adding new users using only an FTP connection. This was in response to our Quick Guide that describes how to do the same thing inside phpMyAdmin, which requires cPanel (or similar) access. For many situations, I believe this FTP route is quite a bit simpler and requires requesting less complete access from your clients.

Last night, inspired partly by David’s recent Quick Guide, I migrated an existing WordPress site’s 180MB filesystem onto a new SiteGround hosting account in about five minutes.

The conventional method of turning off and on plugins in WordPress works 99.9% of the time. But sometimes, when you’re doing development work in a fast way (possibly “cowboy coding” in a sloppy way… :p), you’ll need to make plugin stop being loaded by WordPress in a different way. For that very small percentage case, it’s useful to know how to disable a plugin when you aren’t able to login to the admin area of a WordPress site. That’s where the (S)FTP hack we’ll cover today comes in.

We live in an imperfect world: we park on driveways and drive on parkways, buy hotdogs in sixes and buns in eights, and sometimes we don’t have the client’s FTP credentials.

WordPress site migrations are not easy. In fact, without additional tools, “migrate a site to another URL” is probably one of the most technical jobs that a WordPress site administrator might commonly perform.

This post picks up where a recent post left off: Arguing that WordPress’s “Discourage search engines” feature is best left unused because of the dire SEO consequences if you forget to disable it once a site is live. Here, we explore specific alternatives to “Discourage search engines” that don’t carry its risks.