A password reset only works if the site can send email. Many WordPress sites cannot, and that is usually discovered in exactly this situation. Fortunately the password can be changed in three other ways.
The reset message goes to the address stored for the user, not the one you are used to. If a former employee is listed as the administrator, the message lands in their mailbox. Check the spam folder too, because automated messages from websites often end up there.
This is the fastest route when you are in a hurry. Open the database tool in your hosting panel, find the table whose name ends in _users and edit your own row. Type a new password into the user_pass field and choose MD5 as the hashing function. WordPress recognises the old format and upgrades it to the modern one at your first login. Working with the database is covered in our guide on managing the database.
If you do not know which user is yours, you can add a new user to the same table and give it administrator rights. Do this only if step 2 fails, because adding a user also requires a row in the permissions table.
If the reset message never arrived, the site probably does not send any other messages either. That means contact form messages and shop order confirmations may have been disappearing for a long time. This is a serious matter and it is worth fixing now rather than next time.
The most common cause is that messages are sent by a server function without authentication, so the receiving server rejects them. The lasting fix is to send them through a real mailbox. The authentication records involved are covered in our guide on SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
Then this is not about the password. See our guide on not being able to log in to the admin, which covers cookies, address settings and plugins.
Do not request the reset ten times in a row. Every request invalidates the previous link, so if the messages arrive with a delay, only the last one works and the earlier ones look broken. Do not leave the new password sitting in your inbox either.
We restore access to the site and fix what the symptom was really telling you about, the email sending. Otherwise the next form messages and order confirmations disappear the same way.
