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How to Fix WordPress Login Page Refreshing and Redirecting Issue

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Does your WordPress login page keep refreshing and redirecting when you try to log in to your website?

This issue locks you out of the WordPress admin area, making you unable to work on your website.

In this article, we will show you how to fix the WordPress login page refreshing and redirecting issue.

Fixing the login page redirect and refresh issue in WordPress

What Causes the Login Page Refresh and Redirect Issue in WordPress?

The WordPress login page refresh and redirect error is usually caused by incorrect WordPress URL settings or failure to set login cookies.

Normally, when you log in, WordPress validates your username and password and then sets a login cookie in your browser. After that, it redirects you to the WordPress dashboard.

If WordPress fails to set the login cookie correctly or your WordPress admin area URL is incorrect, then you will be redirected back to the login screen instead of the admin dashboard.

Login page redirect issue in WordPress

Login issues can also be caused by different WordPress errors, such as the error establishing database connection, internal server error, or the white screen of death.

With that in mind, let’s troubleshoot and fix the WordPress login page redirect and refresh issue. You can use these quick links to jump to a specific method:

Note: If you want to try the advanced steps in this WordPress tutorial, then please create a backup of your site first. See our guide on how to manually create a WordPress database backup.

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If you don’t like the video or prefer the written version instead, then please continue reading.

Method 1: Clear Cookies to Resolve Login Issues

WordPress uses cookies for login authentication, so the first step in troubleshooting WordPress login issues is the simplest one. You will need to clear your browser cookies and cache.

In Google Chrome, simply click on the browser settings menu and then select More Tools » Clear Browsing Data.

Clear browsing data in Google Chrome

This will launch the Chrome Settings page with a ‘Clear Browsing Data’ popup displayed on the screen.

From here, you need to select the ‘Clear cookies and other site data’ and ‘Cached images and files’ options.

Clear cookies and cache in Google chrome

Next, click on the ‘Clear data’ button, and Google Chrome will clear the browser cache.

Also, make sure that your browser has cookies enabled. After doing that, restart your browser and then try to log in. This should fix the issue for most folks.

We have a complete guide with screenshots showing how to clear the cache and cookies in all major browsers.

Method 2: Update WordPress URL Settings

WordPress comes with settings for the URL of your website and the URL of your WordPress installation.

If you had access to your WordPress admin area, then you could see this option on the Settings » General page.

WordPress URL settings

If these URLs are incorrect, then WordPress will redirect you back to the login page.

Since you are unable to access the WordPress admin area, you will need to edit the wp-config.php file to fix this issue.

The wp-config.php file is a special file in WordPress that contains your important WordPress settings. You can access it using an FTP client or via the File Manager app in your WordPress hosting account dashboard.

Editing wp-config.php file via FTP

You will find the wp-config.php file in your site’s root folder. Simply edit the file and paste the following lines of code just before the one that says, 'That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing'.

define('WP_HOME','https://www.example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','https://www.example.com');

Don’t forget to replace ‘example.com’ with your own domain name.

After that, save your changes and upload the file back to your website.

You can now visit your WordPress website and try to log in. Hopefully, this will have fixed the issue for you. If it didn’t, then continue reading for additional troubleshooting steps.

Method 3: Delete .htaccess File in WordPress

Sometimes, the .htaccess file can get corrupted, which can result in internal server errors or the login page refreshing error.

Simply access your website using an FTP client or via the File Manager app in your hosting provider’s dashboard.

Once connected, locate the .htaccess file in the root directory of your website and download it to your computer as a backup.

If you can’t find your .htaccess file, this guide on why your .htaccess file may be missing can help you.

Delete .htaccess file in WordPress

After that, go ahead and delete the .htaccess file from your website.

Next, open the wp-admin directory, and if there is a .htaccess file there, then go ahead and delete it as well.

You can now try to log in to your WordPress website. If you succeed, then this means that your .htaccess file was stopping you from logging in to WordPress.

Once you are logged in, simply go to the Settings » Permalinks page in the WordPress admin panel and click on the ‘Save’ button without making any changes. This will generate a new .htaccess file for your website.

Method 4: Deactivate All WordPress Plugins

Sometimes, WordPress plugins can cause this issue, especially if there is a conflict between two plugins.

To easily deactivate all your WordPress plugins, connect to your website using an FTP client or via the File Manager app in your web hosting account dashboard.

Once connected, go to the /wp-content/ directory. Inside it, you will see a folder named ‘plugins’. This is where WordPress installs all your plugins.

Rename plugins folder to deactivate all plugins

Simply rename the plugins folder to ‘plugins_backup’. This will deactivate all WordPress plugins installed on your website.

We also have a detailed tutorial on how to deactivate all WordPress plugins when the WordPress admin is inaccessible.

Once you have deactivated all plugins, try logging in to your WordPress site. If you succeed, then this means that one of your plugins was causing the issue.

Method 5: Revert to the Default Theme

WordPress themes can also cause conflicts after upgrading to a newer version of WordPress or the theme itself. To find out whether the problem is being caused by your theme, you will need to deactivate it.

The process is similar to deactivating plugins. Connect to your website using an FTP client. Then, you must go to /wp-content/themes/ directory and rename your current theme directory to ‘themes_backup’.

Once you have done that, then try logging in again. If you succeed, then this means your theme was causing the issue.

You can now reinstall a fresh copy of your theme to see if this resolves the issue. If the problem reappears, then you will need to contact your theme’s support or switch to a different WordPress theme.

We hope this article helped you resolve the WordPress login page refreshing and redirecting issue. You may also want to see our complete WordPress troubleshooting guide or check out our top picks for the best WordPress plugins and tools to grow your site.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

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Editorial Staff

Editorial Staff at WPBeginner is a team of WordPress experts led by Syed Balkhi with over 16 years of experience in WordPress, Web Hosting, eCommerce, SEO, and Marketing. Started in 2009, WPBeginner is now the largest free WordPress resource site in the industry and is often referred to as the Wikipedia for WordPress.

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Reader Interactions

355 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Syed Balkhi says

    Hey WPBeginner readers,
    Did you know you can win exciting prizes by commenting on WPBeginner?
    Every month, our top blog commenters will win HUGE rewards, including premium WordPress plugin licenses and cash prizes.
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  2. Goxi says

    You safe my life man! Just messed around the login wp admin site if it wasn’t for this tutorial I would never have solved the problem!

  3. Tomer says

    Thank you very much for this tutorial!
    I have tried these methods and managed to temporarily fix the problem.

    The thing is, that after everything seems to be working again, the next day it happens again. Without me changing anything at all. Any tips on that?

    • WPBeginner Support says

      You would want to reach out to your hosting provider to ensure there is nothing on their end that could be causing this conflict

      Admin

  4. Sulivan says

    For those who ended up here an after all steps could’t solve this, check if you changed table prefix. I have changed mines and just figured out that there are some usermeta that stores the old prefix.

  5. Ann says

    Thanks a lot to all of you, and specially to Hand: Changing back php version to 7.3 solved this for me! :-D

  6. Hand says

    I had this issue and spent an entire day trying every possible solution mentioned here and elsewhere without any progress. Then I remembered that I had changed the PHP version from 7.3 to 7.4 on my hosting’s control panel (DirectAdmin). Changing back php version to 7.3 solved this for me.

    • Joe says

      I’ve just worked out that PHP 7.4 missed three of the extensions we had installed on PHP 7.3:

      php74-php-opcache
      php74-php-process
      php74-php-soap

      As soon as they were enabled and provisioned the wp-admin 404 error disappeared. Hope that helps you to upgrade to 7.4 trouble-free!

  7. Shiv says

    Hi

    I followed this article and in my case i found one plugin was causing this issue.So it found it by renaming each plugin and keep trying the login and once i reached this plugin and renamed it …admin login worked.So…i renamed back rest of the plugins to their original names and keep this once renamed and admin worked and later i sorted my plugin

    Thanks

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Glad you were able to get your site working and thanks for sharing the method you used for other users with this issue :)

      Admin

  8. mark says

    I deleted the htaccess file as instructed, and now I can’t get a login screen at all. No access to my site (404)

  9. Giang Nguyen says

    thanks man. Your Update Site URL works!
    I tried to manually install piece by piece in my local macbook, to learn how wordpress work, and missing your piece!

    The install manual doesn’t really have this kind of info =)

    giang

  10. Todd says

    I’ve had this issue before many years ago and I think my fix was the same this time as it was then. After trying many many suggestions above, what finally did it for me was clearing my chrome browsing history. Someone mentioned trying that and not working, but this was not actually offered as a solution so I thought I would post it. Thanks!

  11. Peter says

    I was having a login error where my login page keeps refreshing and redirecting me back to the login screen. And for me (I tried all of the above solutions) and none of them worked.

    Then I checked the error_log file on my WordPress site and saw that the problem I was having said “WordPress database error Disk full”

    As a result, I went into my wp-config.php file and added the following code to file right above the text line where it says in the file “* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”.

    The code I added is:

    define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘256M’);

    Problem solved.

    • Chris says

      Thanks for this – it worked perfectly and tehe memory limit solved the problem. I was really angry because all other stuff like plugins, themes, .htaccess didn’t work!!!
      Greetigs Chris

  12. purushotham says

    i am not able to login my wordpress admin ,getting 404 error.what should i do to reslove the issue.

  13. Travis says

    None of these options worked for me… Turns out to be a hosting issue. Called Network Solutions and they said that because my database was over 300mb I needed to upgrade my database because after 300mb they lock you out…. Upgrading by DB fixed the issue. Who knew….?!

      • WPBeginner Support says

        You would reach out to your hosting provider and they would let you know if you need more space for your database similar to Travis

        Admin

  14. hamdi says

    Defining these lines ON TOP OF wp-config.php helped. They don’t help if you put them at the bottom.

    define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
    define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);

    • WPBeginner Support says

      It should still work if you place it at the bottom of the wp-config file, there may have been a problem with where you placed it depending on what’s in your specific wp-config file.

      Admin

  15. Joe G says

    Nothing worked for me until I went into ftp server and edited index.php in the site’s root (alongside all of the other wp-related files mentioned here), and set define( ‘WP_USE_THEMES’, FALSE )

    This will temporarily break your site temporarily (no error codes, just white screen), though my site loading wasn’t the problem. This allowed me to finally access my dashboard through the login site, where I then put a brand new theme on and fixed what I thought might be the culprit (I made the mistake of redirecting my “Home” link on my menu to an exterior site).

    After removing the “Home” link, (or just to be safe, the menu in general), and creating a new menu with only the pages in question I wanted to use, I re-set the ‘wp_use_themes’ to TRUE and we’re back off to the races again!

    • WPBeginner Support says

      If none of these methods worked then you may want to reach out to your hosting provider to ensure there aren’t any issues on their end.

      Admin

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Do you mean people can view your site or people can log in to your site? If you mean the login then if you’ve logged in once, WordPress should log you back in but your site’s visitors would still need to log in. If you visit your site in an incognito browser you should see what your visitors see.

      Admin

  16. Pranay Singh says

    I am unable to login to the wordpress admin page as it is showing too many redirects(error) as I had just installed the wordpress and since then I am unable to login the page I have made every change and have checked each possible way through which I can make changes. I have done everything but nothing works. Please help me with the issue.

  17. Peter Guckian says

    For some reason, everytime I go to login into my work’s cms site it redirects me to the actual website rather than the dashboard, have deleted browsing history, cookies, cache etc but no luck. Nobody else in the office seems to have faced this difficulty before

    • WPBeginner Support says

      If you’re using the /wp-admin url to log into the site you may want to try instead using /wp-login.php to see if your browser is not fully clearing the cache.

      Admin

  18. Hugo says

    For me the solution was deleting user.ini file in the root of my site
    This file was created by host

    • WPBeginner Support says

      Thanks for sharing this method, hopefully it helps anyone else if the above methods don’t work :)

      Admin

  19. Stephen Vincent Abarca says

    I have a problem in my login. When I visit my site with /wp-admin it then put itself to /wp-login.php with a popup login indicating “your connection to this site is not private”. I cannot login even I put my user and pass.

  20. mahyar says

    thank you for your guide
    i delete htaccess and every thing fixed
    i made another one from setting and save
    then i compare both backup file and new one
    the backup one has some extra entries
    is it ok? or i wil face problem?

  21. Stefano says

    My issue is little different. When I click on customize theme, i get white page.
    Also tried to install the default theme, but nothing changes. I noticed one thing in the url, this code %3A%2F%2F instead of // and that should be part of the problem i think…
    I wanted to ask if someone had the same misadventure and how he solved it. Thanks P.S. This problem occurred to me a few months ago, but I had not given too much weight, thinking it would be resolved with a new upgrade, but unfortunately it was not …

  22. Reza Taba says

    Divi Builder plugin was the culprit. Disabling it resolved the issue. Then I uninstalled and reinstalled it.
    FIXED.

    Thanks for the help!

  23. Marnus says

    None of the mentioned methods worked for me.

    Resetting my password worked for me though.

    And no, I did not try to log in with the wrong password.
    I tested using a wrong password and the site would respond accordingly by saying it is wrong, but when using the correct password, it would just be in the login loop.

  24. Michael Morad-McCoy says

    NONE of the above worked! Very, very frustrated as I need to migrate my site to a new host and doing so manually hasn’t worked so I wanted to try a plug-in. But I cannot access Network Admin to add the plugins!! Arrgh!

  25. Chinmay Ray says

    Hi, Thank You for this blog it cleared alot of my doubts. I have one query

    i have access to wordpress however, when i login with email and password, i come back to the website instead of wordpress dashboard of that website. Yes am not admin. i have been given access by my client.

    please help me with this.

  26. saber.tabatabaee says

    my case in mysql status of admin user changed to zero 0 and just need to change it to 1

  27. MR-wp says

    Hello dear admin
    I’m really Thankful
    my problem solved after 2 hours struggling
    I am from Iran and I am very happy I visited your website.

  28. Rama says

    i tried all this steps and field to login return me to home page is there is any another solution to fix this issue ? and thanks.

  29. Dapo Momodu says

    When i disabled my plugins folder from cpanel i was able to login. So now i will look for the plugin that made it act like that

  30. Rams says

    Thanks a lot. I dig my head for more than a day on this. I have to move my client’s website from our server to HostGator and I found that even if I gave valid login credentials, I can’t logs into it.

    The stupid thing I did is if WordPress Address URL and Site Address URL is not same, Google Chrome can’t allow to logs in.

    The problem is domain is redirected to www. Since WordPress Address URL doesn’t have www, Chrom didn’t recognize as a legit one.

    Thank you so much for your effort in making this valuable article.

  31. Emilia Wiliams says

    IT WORKED. Thanks!

    I deleted all public, primary and sub-domain .htaccess though.

    Then saved permalinks and all was good.

  32. Umair says

    I also had tried all methods but nothing work. At end when i define my site URL it worked for me.
    Thanks a lot admin.

    define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
    define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);

    these lines worked for me.

  33. Serge says

    Works well for me (just need to wait for a while….)

    wp-config.php
    define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
    define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);

    Thanks
    Cheers
    Serge

  34. HengamV says

    I had the same problem for a week … I tried everything on this list and so more and nothing helped to fix that … just try this one too and let me know if it works:

    download “php.ini” file and delete it !
    if it works then there is problem with a code in this file … solve the problem making code and fix it and again upload “php.ini” back into your public_html folder

    • Luke says

      HENGAMV – That works!!

      “download “php.ini” file and delete it !
      if it works then there is problem with a code in this file … solve the problem making code and fix it and again upload “php.ini” back into your public_html folder”
      MT!

  35. Anna says

    “Update Site URL” for the win! Thanks so much. I was neck deep in suggested help articles before I found this. Worked immediately, and super simple too.

  36. Alex says

    None of the solutions worked for me. But what I discovered was my host provider suspects a custom script was malicious and placed a post block on my server. Once I removed that, I can login again.

    • Shabeel says

      Dear Sir,

      Same Problem here.. None of the solutions worked for me. May I How to remove that custom script from my server. ??

  37. Holly Louise says

    This is too damn upsetting. EVERY time I try to log in to my wordpress.com account I am told I have the wrong password EVEN when I get it reset by wordpress!! I am NOT going to disable all my extensions. I am NOT going to clear my cache every time I want to log in to use my account. Pain in the arse. Figure it out people. Find a way for the users to actually use this thing! This has been going on for years and it is WHY I rarely ever use wordpress.

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