Earlier today I decided it was finally time to upgrade my company’s WordPress to the latest 3.5.1 and various plugins. I can admit at first I was reluctant to do so because I haven’t updated my theme in a while and presumed an error was bound to arise upon updating WordPress.

After updating WordPress initially I thought I was in the clear because I could browse my site. However, lo and behold a few minutes later I came to find out my admin dashboard was broke: 500 internal error inaccessible broke.

My first thought was somehow there was a corrupt file in the new installation in WordPress seeing as how that was the only change I’ve made. So, I decided to manually download a copy of WordPress 3.5.1 and reinstall it myself.

So I did with no prevail.

I then moved on to the next logical WordPress troubleshooting fix: disabling plugins. The only problem I had this time is the inability to get into my WordPress backend to disable said plugins.

Thus is when I came across this ingenious way of disabling ALL WordPress plugins without having anything other than FTP access. Simply go access your sites FTP and rename the plugins folder to anything (ie: Plugins1).

Once like myself you’ve narrowed down the culprit simply remove the plugin and rename the folder back to plugins and go about your day as usual.