You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page

If you want to check your user permissions, log in to your hosting account and use cPanel (or the tool your host provides). Open phpMyAdmin and select your database in the left column. Then select the wp_users table to find your ID (usually ‘1’). Once confirmed, open the wp_usermeta table and find the capabilities for that user. It should be admin of course.

This is what it says for my wp_capabilities.

a:1:{s:13:”administrator”;b:1;}

Does that look right?

That’s right.

I would next take a look at the contents of wp-config.php and make sure the info there is correct: database login stuff, and wp table prefix. By default the prefix is wp_.

Then browse your directories (esp. /wp-admin) and files to make sure of their permission settings. Refer to this page for specifics on what they should be. If you have a shared-hosting account, for example, look at the section with that heading. Commonly directories get set to 755 and files to 644, but read the details for your particular case.

Bill, Thanks for your help. Unfortunately I’m still stuck. The settings look good to me, but honestly I’m not sure exactly what to look for.

Any recommendations? Is there a service that I can go to for help figuring it out?

Sorry you’re not making headway with this yet. A couple other things you might try:

The first is easy and a standard troubleshooting step: on your server, rename the plugins folder (found in the wp-content folder) to plugins-hold. This will disable them. See if you can log in. If so, rename the folder and re-activate them one at a time to find the problem. You can rename your active theme as well to rule it out.

The second is not difficult but a mistake can kill your db and thus your site. Only do this if you’re confident about it.

During this morning’s session I did delete the mg-quotes plugin.

Because this directly preceded the problem, it’s worth a look. I see that the plugin says that upon deletion it will remove its data from the db. Maybe something there didn’t go smoothly. I would go back to the db on your server as you did before. Before anything else, use cPanel Backups to backup your database to be safe (make a site backup while you’re at it).

Open the database (but don’t select a particular table) and scroll down below the last row of tables in the main panel. Check the box that says ‘Check All’. To the right (‘with selected:’) you can then choose ‘check tables’. If any need repair, you can repair them in a similar fashion.

That’s what I would do if it were my site, but again, if you’d rather not live on the edge, there’s a link at the bottom of this page for posting to the job board for paid help. Alternatively, you could mark this thread resolved, and start a new thread with this issue so someone else can have a look. Good luck whatever course you take!

I have a website running and I received the “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” error when I tried to log into the Admin page this afternoon

What page were you trying to access that threw the error? Can you post the exact URL here? Is that a plugin page or a core WP page?

You can also get that error if that page is a plugin page and the plugin no longer exists.

Bill –
I did all of the things that you mentioned: renamed the plug-in folder, same result. Renamed the active theme folder, same result. Backed up the site and the database, and then did the check. All came back OK.

Rajesh,
The page I’m trying to access is the main dashboard that appears immediately after entering the username and password. https://smartrecoverytwincities.org/wp-admin

The good news is that I’m learning some debugging skills. I appreciate your help.

I’ll probably sit tight on it today and do a little more research before posting something on the job board.

Thanks again. Rob

Hi Rob. Looks like you’re at least finding your way around WP pretty well. No new insights here but a couple things to add.

If you or your host have a backup that precedes the problem, you could just roll back to that and probably be done. They could help you with that if needed.

Otherwise, you said above (re: wp-config and file permissions) that you weren’t sure what to look for. Be sure to clear that up because those could still hold the answer. In wp-config.php the settings for db_name, user, password, and host should all match the info you’ve used successfully in the past. Double check that the db tables prefix in wp-config.php (normally wp_) matches the actual tables via phpMyAdmin.

There are also a couple places inside certain tables that use the prefix. In wp_options there should be an option named wp_user_roles whose prefix matches the one in wp-config. Similarly in wp_usermeta, wp_capabilities (you checked before and it was good, but make sure you see straight-quotes and not curly-quotes) and wp_user_level (value of 10) should match.

An easy way to check file permissions is, in cPanel, use File Manager. Select your WP root in the left column (could be www, public, public_html, wp, etc) and scan down the right-hand ‘Perms’ column. Again, typically folders (directories) are 0755, and files are 0644 (but reference the Codex page linked here above).

When you deleted the MG Quotes plugin, did it leave parts behind? Look for traces in the wp_options table for option names that may begin with mgq or something similar. There could even be tables created by the plugin (wp_mgq_something). If you find those, you could try uploading a fresh copy of the plugin to wp-content/plugins as a test.

Finally, you could try deleting and re-installing the wp-admin folder and wp-login.php file to rule those out. You could try that first, actually. And with that, I’m all out of ideas, at least for now.

Bill,
Thanks for taking so much time to offer advice. The advice helped me get much more comfortable navigating through the database tables and trying some basic debugging.

I’ve also learned my lesson about routine back-ups prior to doing anything of significance, and I’ve learned that uninstalling plugins DOES constitute a significant change.

I finally gave up trying to recover from this error and decided to just redevelop the site. It wasn’t that complicated of a site, and because it was still operational I was able to get most of the content off of it. So, I deleted wordpress, reinstalled it and started from scratch. It took me about a day and a half to put it back in working order.

The good news is that it took much less time due to being further down the learning curve, and I was able to implement some of the site much more cleanly than the way I had done it before.

Again, thanks for your help.
Rob

That’s great. Really glad you got your site back into shape again, and that you got to dig into WP a bit deeper. That will help you a lot down the road. Anyway, please mark this as resolved, and you’re welcome. ??

Thanks for all of the help.
Rob

I’ve been experiencing the exact same problem the last few days. I was deleting some unused plugins last week and suddenly could not access wp-admin/index.php, profile.php or update-core.php. The Dashboard link was gone from the admin menu. I was afraid that it was due to a Role Manager I had deleted. Reinstalling and checking I found that somehow the Dashboard “Read” capability in the default admin role had been removed.

I luckily had a backup from the previous night.

This morning I went through a manual restore and deleted plugins one-by-one.

After deleting the MG-Quote plugin, the Dashboard link disappeared and the “You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page” problem resurfaced.

So … how do you get a plug-in like this off your site without corrupting your install?