account recovery and password failed reset

Sorry you’re having such a run around with this. I know it’s frustrating.

I hope this helps clarify what you’re seeing. You have self-hosted WP sites, which means they exist on the server of your paid web hosting account. WP.COM has nothing to do with those sites except that if you have a .com account, it will track your stats and provide convenient links to certain admin pages for those external sites. At WP.com, you have your own login credentials for that .com site. In general, support there doesn’t apply to your sites because they operate differently.

YET even while it was telling me that my site did not exist at WP.com, I was able to access my WordPress.com account without a password, see the stats on the sites (which it had just told me didn’t exist), change my password, everything except access the WP Admin to be able to edit and update my site/s

WP.com is aware of your sites if you link them there, but they don’t exist there on their servers. You probably changed your .com password.

Here at WP.ORG, the support site for self-hosted WP sites such as yours, you will have (possibly/hopefully) different login credentials. (At least the password should be different.) Further, those credentials are not the same as your logins for your individual sites.

Now regarding your main problem, clear your browser cache and cookies, make sure you’re using the right password for your site, and try again. If that still doesn’t get you in, look at this page which has very detailed options for resetting a password. There are different ways to go about it so look them over, with particular attention to the FTP method if that suits you. I hope this helps you get it sorted, but post again if you need to. Good luck!

Dear Bill,

Thank you for your patient and clear explanation. I am getting a better grip on the difference between WP.com and WP.org and the hosting company. I have tried clearing cache and cookies, and also resetting Safari. The good news is that my Safari now runs faster. The bad news is it has made no difference to the problem.

Again, I tried clicking ‘Lost Password’, entered my username, and got a message saying a confirmation email had been sent – without any such email appearing.

I will try the reset from within WP.org, but FTP feels like a Frighteningly Technical Process (I am a non-technical writer).

Appreciate your help and will undoubtedly come back if I get nowhere.

Kind regards,
Beatrice

OK, really sorry for my stupidity. Having looked at the How To Reset Your Password page, I am stumped. The only one I can understand is the first one (since the ‘automatically via email’ option is clearly closed to me for some reason):

To change your password in current versions:

In the Admin Panel menu, go to USERS
Click on your username in the list to edit
In the Edit User screen, scroll down to the New Password section and type in a new password in the two boxes provided. The strength box will show how good (strong) your password is.
Click the UPDATE PROFILE button

DUMB question – what and where is the mystery ‘Admin Panel menu’?

Link to my site (one of them, I have the same problem with ALL of them): https://www.beatriceotto.com

Thanks for your kind help – I am getting mildly stressed by this bizarre problem.

Best wishes,
Beatrice

Somebody kindly suggested the closed loop ‘Lost Password’ process, whereby the promised ‘confirmation email’ never arrives, may be due to an updated plug-in. Since I have a plug-in to automatically update my chosen theme, could this be the root of the problem? In which case, if I go into my WP.com account, I can disable various plug-ins.

Will this mess everything up? Or might it help?

Welcome your guidance – having successfully designed my first ever website, I had no idea it could become so mind-numbingly complicated!

Best wishes,
Beatrice

what and where is the mystery ‘Admin Panel menu’?

Sorry to say, but this is part of the site admin backend which you access by logging in. ??

if I go into my WP.com account, I can disable various plug-ins

If you have previously enabled Remote Management, I believe that may be something to try. If you haven’t, I don’t think you’ll be able to without being able to log in, though I’m not sure since I don’t use that.

However, disabling plugins and your current theme is a good thing to try at this point, so we can do it another way if Remote Management (from WP.com) isn’t an option. If you’d rather not, just ask your web host to do it for you on one site as a test. Simple for them. (You might ask them about the login problem first, even before that.)

To try it yourself, log in to your hosting account cPanel and use the File Manager.

Navigate to the folder of the site you want to try it on and find wp-contents/themes/activetheme (e.g. divi) and rename the active theme’s folder to ‘activetheme-hold’ (e.g. divi-hold).

Navigate to wp-content/plugins and rename the plugins folder ‘plugins-hold’.

That will disable the theme and plugins and cause WP to use a default theme. Go back and clear your browser cache and cookies and try again to login. Try both your new password and the old (clearing again in between). If nothing changes, you can go back and rename the two folders to their original names.

Before you make changes, it’s always good to make backups of your site and database, which you can do using the backup tools in cPanel. Let me know if this is unclear.