How to use WP-CLI on your hosting

WP-CLI is the official command-line tool for managing WordPress. Anything you can do by clicking through the dashboard, WP-CLI can usually do in a single line — updating plugins, creating users, running a database search-and-replace, or checking which version of WordPress core is installed — and it can do several of them at once in a script, which the dashboard cannot.

What you need

• SSH access to your hosting account. See using SSH on a hosting account if you have not connected before.
• WP-CLI available on the account, either pre-installed or installable in your own directory depending on the hosting environment.

Checking WP-CLI is available

Connect over SSH, move into the folder containing your WordPress install, and run:

wp --info

If this returns version details for WP-CLI, PHP, and your WordPress install, you are ready to go. If the command is not found, check with your host whether it needs enabling for your account or installing manually.

Commands worth knowing

Checking versions and status

wp core version
wp plugin list
wp theme list

Updating everything

wp core update
wp plugin update --all
wp theme update --all

This is considerably faster than clicking Update on each item individually in the dashboard, particularly on a site with a large number of plugins. See updating WordPress without breaking your site for the safety practices — taking a backup first, and updating one thing at a time when you specifically want to isolate which update caused a problem — that still apply whether you update through the dashboard or the command line.

Managing plugins

wp plugin activate plugin-name
wp plugin deactivate plugin-name
wp plugin deactivate --all
wp plugin install plugin-name --activate

The ability to deactivate every plugin with one command is genuinely useful during troubleshooting — see disabling plugins when you cannot log in for when this matters most, since it works even if wp-admin itself will not load.

Managing users

wp user list
wp user create newusername user@example.com --role=administrator
wp user update 1 --user_pass=new-password

The last example resets a user's password directly by their user ID — useful when you are locked out of the dashboard entirely but still have SSH access, as an alternative to editing the database through phpMyAdmin.

Search and replace across the database

wp search-replace 'oldsite.com' 'newsite.com'

WP-CLI's search-replace command is specifically written to handle WordPress's serialized data correctly, which makes it one of the safest ways to do this job — safer than a manual find-and-replace in phpMyAdmin, which can corrupt serialized values if it is not aware of their structure. See searching and replacing inside a database for the background on why this matters. Add --dry-run first to see what would change without actually making the change, which is worth doing before running it for real.

Database export and import

wp db export backup.sql
wp db import backup.sql

Clearing cache and transients

wp cache flush
wp transient delete --all

Maintenance mode and cron

wp maintenance-mode activate
wp maintenance-mode deactivate
wp cron event list
wp cron event run --all

Putting a site into maintenance mode from the command line is useful immediately before a bulk operation like a database import, since it needs no plugin and takes effect the moment the command runs. The cron commands are equally useful for checking whether WordPress's own scheduled tasks are actually running as expected, which is otherwise invisible from the dashboard.

Running WP-CLI on a multisite installation

Most commands accept a --url= flag to target a specific site within a network, for example wp plugin activate plugin-name --url=subsite.example.com. Without it, WP-CLI generally acts on the main site of the network by default.

Why this is worth learning even if you rarely use it

The dashboard is fine for occasional changes. WP-CLI earns its place in two specific situations: when you need to repeat the same action across many plugins or users at once, and when the dashboard itself is unreachable — a plugin has broken the admin area, or the site is in a login loop — and SSH is the only way in. In both cases, a single command replaces what would otherwise be a slow manual workaround, or is not possible through the dashboard at all.