How to disable/remove Google Authenticator for your WordPress user account

Sometimes a user of a website will lose their Google Authenticator information and not be able to log into the site.

This can happen if a user loses or resets their phone, for example.

Important: Before you can perform the steps outlined here, you must ensure that the Google Authenticator system for your WordPress site is enabled.

The primary way to disable Google Authenticator for your user account is to disable it directly from your WordPress user profile.

To do this, log into your site and go to Users > Your Profile > and click to remove Google Authenticator.

Once you do this, Google Authenticator will be removed (disabled) from your user profile.

You will also get a message that this was removed from your user account:

Important: If for some reason this doesn't work for you, please follow the guide outlined in the article here.

A 3rd alternative is to delete your User meta data for the Shield plugin. This is an advanced technique and not generally recommended.

1. Use a database management tool such as phpMyAdmin (it comes with most hosting accounts)
2. Locate the table "usermeta"
3. Search the table for the entries where the "meta_key" name is "icwp-wpsf-meta".
4. There may be more than 1. Locate the entry that corresponds to the User ID of your WordPress user account.
5. Delete this row of the database.