WordPress Login Issues:WP-Admin Showing 404 Error Page
Yesterday i noticed a strange WordPress login problem. When i hit techzoomin.com/wp-admin, it’s simply taking me to 404 error page and if i try with techzoomin.com/wp-login.php, its showing the login page. But upon giving the credentials, its showing 404 page again. My mind was blank for one minute, my first doubt was “whether my blog got hacked?” 
But thank God, Later i realized it as a known problem and Googled for the solution. Spent almost 2 hours on the web and tried many things like
- Deleting .htaccess File and uploading the fresh one
- Tried with replacing wp-login.php
- Checking tables
- Deleting/deactivating all the plugins
And many more…you can see some of them on WordPress Login troubles page. Later saw my friend Harsh of ShoutMeLoud online and explained him about the strange problem. Then we both started digging in. Btw Harsh found some article “wp-admin.php 404 not found Error Wordpress“, it didn’t give me 100% solution, but it gave some idea to play with folder attributes.
Then started changing file attributes in Filezilla and succeeded finally. Here is the solution for you
1. Login to your FTP and go to /public_html/wp-admin
2. Right click on wp-admin folder and click on File Attributes
3. Change the value to 755 and check the Recurse into subdirectories checkbox
4. Click Ok
Repeat the same 4 steps for wp-content and wp-includes also.
Now clear your browser cache and try to login to your WordPress admin panel. You’ll be able to login now. Contact us if you see any problem.
Let us know if you have faced and solved this problem in any other way. Happy Blogging!!
I have wondered about his as I have some blogs that have no issue with the wp-admin directory and others that give the 404 error. I thought it was the theme as certain themes seem to issue while others Do not.
I understand how frustrating this problem could be.. But we had a nice gala time solving it.. Its always fun to trouble shoot such unexpected problem.. is int it??
Of course but when we have time
Well not when you have something really important to Do inside the dashboard !
I’m experiencing this problem and have tried a number of things. This solution did *not* work for me, unfortunately.
-cmd
wtf. this worked on me. thanks!
whew~
Wow! you have no idea how great this is. Spent 3 hours last night trying to debug the 403 error which ended up into a 500. This morning when I came across this arrticle, within 3 minutes was my problem solved. My WordPress login page is back again. I can log in. Thanks a lot.
M.J.
Hi there, i had transfered my blog from host to another, and this problem occurred, i tried my level best to solve the issue, tried changing .htaccess and other things, but all in vain.
http://www.pkreaders.com/wp-admin
i have also tried uploading new directories and the method you told, but nothing solved my problem.
Now i have installed new WordPress for test purpose and it worked well, in the directory
http://www.pkreaders.com/wp
everything was working like a charm but when i overwritten my old database on new blog, wp-admin still opens well and i am able to login, but now main page does not open, i mean index.php does not work.
http://www.pkreaders.com/wp
does not open.
is there any issue with my db? please tell me, i have into all this for days.
Waiting for your kind response.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this. However this did not solve the problem for me.
If I figure it out I’ll post it here.
I had this same problem and for some reason it happened simultaneously across several of my WordPress sites. It freaked me out! but this seems to have fixed the problem… any idea what causes that?
Hey Matt,
In the end it turned out that my ISP (along with many South African ISP’s apparently) is going through a transparent SAIX proxy which is the reason it’s been wreaking havoc on WordPress‘ cookie-based login as there are multiple IPs being sent to Wordpress when I login.
I manually set my explicit proxy to:
cache.saix.net:8080
…and that has completely sorted out the problem. I just wish I knew it was as easy as that before manually changing every File permission like this tutorial suggested!
I used the Foxy Proxy addon to set the proxy on Firefox. I was unable to find a fix for Chrome.
(I found the detailed fix here: http://www.webafrica.co.za/kb/ADSL/proxy_add_browser.html )
Thank you so much! After an arduous search your solution finally helped!
Just some info for others that may have this problem, I moved my website over to a new host, and I guess the permissions got messed up.
I had this problem (had, thanks to this post). Worked with my ISP and they couldn’t help. I tried to trouble shoot the .htaccess File, plugin directory.. thank you. Your solution has allowed me to access an old blog which I haven’t touched since WP 2.5.
Thanks a lot for your help. I had no idea what to Do but now is everything perfect!
Hi there Lax;
I have to say, this really helped me out on one of my projects, so thanks a TON: like you, I thought my blog got hacked as well! Great work on being very thorough on the steps involved – couldn’t have made it any easier.
Roger Sanchez
This solves our problem but after doing this, single post, tags, category and other pages display the rss feed of our site.
Any idea?
I faced the same problem on my site greencamp.in today morning.. I am now changing permission.. I’ll update the result
same probleme! not solved
but how strange? …755 to all files and folders?
this didn’t work for me either
After creating .htaccess File I am not even able to login, it gives 404 error for …/wp-login.php
It is a problem with the shared Hosting. Nothing can be done from developers’ side. Just raise a complaint or ticket to hosting provider and they will solve this problem within a minute. Dont waste time trying different tricks they are useless.
Thanks heaps. Had the same problem, googled like mad, came across your site, tried it and it worked!!! Awesome stuff!!
this is not working for me
http://telecoms.ninja.pk/wp-admin/
You are the best. Just moved my Hosting account from one server to another. The new server uses suPHP with tighter restrictions on File / directory permissions than my old server.
You just saved me a huge amount of time searching.
Did a Google search your blog came up #1 read the post. 5 minutes later problem solved.
Thanks for sharing your efforts.
Aaron
hey guys thanks a lot m just looking for solution n find u in just couple of minutes so that’ll save a lot of time of mine n it’s works for me so thanksss…god blesss
Brilliant – exactly what was needed! Thanks a lot for this post, it solved my problem first time.
My permissions are already set to 755.
What should i Do? Same problem still
thank you,..
my site is oke now..
Been searching for a solution to this problem for 2 weeks and having a really bad time until I found your post. All sorted now thanks to you.
Cheers
Mike
Thanks!
Worked Fine to me.
This one works but not at all times, to detail it. All files under wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes should be 644 and all directories should be 755, inlcuding the 3 main directories itself.
i am facing the same probleum please help me..
and this tutorial didnt worked for me please help me
Hey Lax thanks for your post..tried it but still the problem persist.The main admin is not able to login but I am able to login with editor.
Thanks a lot, I got the same problem, I searched it on “G” and got your website. I just worked on the intructions mentioned in your blogpost and it worked for me…
@ruchita search for all files having chmod 0000 permissions, and give them permission of 0755. [there option "change permission" in cpanel.]
THanks Lax.
moreover, I loved your captcha which is below submit button.
this doesn’t work for me
i tried change 755 by ftp
and chmod -R 755 wp-admin by command
no luck
Hi,
Here is the update.
I Recompiled the apache with “Easy apache…”
and added the support for iconcube and frontpage,
now it is fixed.
Don’t know why
Hey, Thanks for the solution. It solved my problem.
it didnt work for me and this is really starting to get frustrating
Thanks a lot!
I´ve made many things and nothing worked. This tutorial did the job.
Great post.
Worked for me. Thanks!
Wow, big thanks man.
I came across this problem last night. At first I thought it just didn’t load correctly cause it often does that but kept retrying and it took me to the 404 page over and over ..
So then I search on Google this morning and fix it in 2 minutes. lol
Thanks again,
Zach
Perfect! Of all the links and solutions I have read and tried this is the only one that worked – Thank you for taking the trouble to post it.
PLEASE HELP!
I am a blogger and blog at my blog – http://techinnews.in . Yeasterday night only, I had published a few articles butnow today when I try to access my dashboard through – http://techinnews.in/wp-admin, it is giving me a 404 error.
Please help me what to Do and how to solve it. Thanks in advance.
Vijay
Having the same problem but when I tried to change the attributes to 755 but it already been set to 755 now what should I change it to 777.
Never had any of such problems faced ever. Nice to see an helpful tutorial like this.
for all who still not getting it solved after this … search for wp-login.php File in your directory if it is not there then upload new wp-login.php file. It will solve your problem
I got problem like yours on my new blog,i will try your advice..thank u for sharing
I migrate my Hosting and get this problem. I change directory access with 755 and success to login in wp-admin. Thank for sharing this tutorial
Thank you! I started getting these problems after moving WordPress to another host and was checking the DB, reinstalling etc. with no success. Never even thought of .htaccess
I had the 404 problem when I set up a development site. I copied a site to a new location and could not access the admin panel.
Like most people I Googled the issue, got lots of stuff that didn’t work. I found this tutorial and almost didn’t try it.
I’m glad I did as it straightened out the problem.
Thank you very much!
I also had the 404 problem, adjusting the attributes as suggested here unfortunately did not work. What did the trick for me is using the following in my .htaccess:
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule ./ /index.php [L]
# END WordPress
Hope it helps!
I tried editing .htaccess and didn’t work. Error was “Internal Server Error”. Do you have any other solution?
This keeps happening on my site and I can’t figure out what in the hell is going on. A friend fixed it just like a week ago and now it’s doing it again.
This keeps happening on my site!! I just reset my server and clear .htaccess!!
By mistake i have installed a php script in my root directory, where WordPress is available. After that my all permalinks has been change. After modifying .htaccess File and modified file permission by ftp now My site site is almost ok. Now i can’t log-in admin panel, when i am giving admin user name and password then url redirect to http://investorsbd.com/index.php/wp-login.php (extra index.php has shown) and nothing found for index php login. How can i remove that extra index.php for log-in my wordpress admin control panel?
Please help me, Thanking in advance.
Now I know what is the problem. It is not related to any permission (777/755 etc) or theme. It happens due to the settings’ issues of php.ini File in the WordPress & admin directory. I reported my Hosting company about it, they restored the php.ini file. And I think that’s the only solution.
I had sample problem from long time but dint bother to check the solution, finally decided to get rid of it today, searched abt it reached to all same options but in my case my site had 2 htaccess files i was saved as htaccess old, all imp folders had 755 permission so that was not the issue as soon i deleted htaccess File it worked.