This is an anecdotal post from my own experience. It’s based upon a client with a very difficult and unique position in accessing his WordPress admin login. It demonstrates the importance of a number of things, not least how vital it is to understand the basic workings of WordPress and how we must all have contingency plans.
Background
Several months ago a client who I’d helped occasionally with his commercial site built in Weebly, approached me about pitching for the design and build of a WordPress site to replace it. He’d been happy with Weebly up to that point, but felt WordPress would offer him more scalability going forward.
I pitched for the project but lost out on the work. The client ultimately decided instead to insource the work by recruiting someone with appropriate skills.
It’s always a pity to lose out on work like this but this is a part of self-employed life and you move on. Of course, I extended my offer of help should he need any assistance going forward.
The WordPress Admin Login Issue
Fast forward three months and my client had a new WordPress site. His employee had done a great job and his new site was looking really fantastic. Here’s where the story takes a very unfortunate twist.
A few months after the WordPress site had gone live, my client contacted me in total panic with some very sad news. The employee he’d recruited had sadly passed away very suddenly without warning.
You’ll imagine this caused a number of problems for my client. The biggest concern was that his employee held the keys to all sorts of systems… including WordPress.
Unfortunately for my client, as the WordPress admin the employee hadn’t created accounts for his small team of co-workers in the relatively short time he’d been working with them.
My client had no access to his WordPress site. As an inexperienced WordPress user, he didn’t know how to access it and had floundered for 3 weeks before he contacted me.
Since I know WordPress, my first question was whether he had access to his employee’s email account. He confirmed. I told him that assuming his employee had set up his WordPress admin login using this mail we’d be able to get access.
He gave me the email address and I simply went through the steps to change WordPress passwords in those cases where the password is lost (or forgotten).
Fortunately for my client, his employee had used his company email and so we were able to change the WordPress admin login password and restore access to his company’s site.
The first thing I did was create admin-level accounts for 2 other people in the business to prevent this happening again.
Problem solved.
What’s the Takeaway?
This experience underlined several things for me:
- The dangers of a single point of failure, especially where WordPress users are concerned.
- The importance of understanding the basics of WordPress as a WordPress user.
- It’s easy to assume that even basic skills are not valuable. However basic skills are valuable to someone with no knowledge.
Summary
- If you work in a team make sure there are at least two people with admin level access to your WordPress blog. This will protect you against single points of failure.
- If you own a WordPress blog for your business, make sure more than one person has a basic understanding of how to use WordPress.
- You can reset your WordPress Admin login password (or any password for that matter) at yoursite.com/wp-admin.
See my WordPress tutorials category to find out more about my blogging tool of choice!
Thanks for reading.
Paul
I’d always enjoy feedback. Leave a comment below and make me a happy blogger!
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