Lost Admin access after WordPress Upgrade, getting 404 page

You recently upgraded your wordpress and you are unable to access you admin area! Every time you to access anything related to admin it will add some words to the URL and take you to a 404 (Not Found error message ) page. This is one of the wordpress upgrade problems that you may encounter.

Exactly this is what happened to me, my access to wordpress admin area was lost after wordpress update. I was not able to figure out what the problem is as there were no logs on the server that could help me. I tried to find a log in every folder through FTP but there was no trace.

The solution was easy once I stepped back and started thinking how to solve the issue. I was able to identify that during the wordpress upgrade it seemed to me that it didn’t complete properly. This forced me to think that I may need to cleanup my installation as this is a clear case of a problematic update.

Here is what I did in order to fix my Access to wordpress admin area that I lost after wordpress update :

1. Accessed the server through a FTP. My preferred tool is FileZilla FTP Client.

1. Open the “wp-config.php” in an editor
2. Enable Debugging Mode in order to see the errors: define(‘WP_DEBUG’, true);
3. Save the “wp-config.php”
4. Close the browser and open the site again. This time it will start showing the errors.
5. Based on the errors published please delete the respective plugins from “/wp-content/plugins”. I deleted the Super Cache plugin only.
6. Downloadthe latest release of WordPress.
7. Unzip the downloaded file to a folder on your hard drive.
8. Took a backup of “wp-admin” folder on my server
9. Replaced my server “wp-admin” folder with the folder form the latest release of wordpress.

NOTE: Never replace or update “/wp-content” folder in this way.

1. I tried to access the admin section again and I was prompted by wordpress for database upgrade required.

1. I took a backup of my existing database
2. I pressed the option on the admin page to update the database
3. I was all set with complete access back to my wordpress admin.
4. Open the “wp-config.php” in an editor once again
5. Disable Debugging Mode in order to disable printing of errors to the UI: define(‘WP_DEBUG’, false);
6. Save the “wp-config.php”

Happy Publishing!

Note: If you have seen any other article on other site that addresses this issue please add a link here as I am writing this article to help others who have the same situation.