When moving a site between environments (development, staging, production) you often find the need to change the primary administrator email address. If you try to change the primary admin email address from Settings → General you will see a message like this:
That’s great for security reasons but there are times when you would like to — or need to — bypass that extra step, like when the previous administrator email address is no longer available.
Fortunately there’s an easy way to update that email address within the WordPress admin area. In your browser’s address bar go to example.com/wp-admin/options.php or access it by changing the URL from /options-general.php to /options.php. This page lists data from the options database table, so be careful not to make any unwanted changes. Scroll down to the option named admin_email and fill in the new value.
Once that’s done scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Save Changes”. There, you’ve just updated the primary administrator email address without the confirmation step.