Sharing your password can put you in a lot of anxiety when working with a developer from sites like Fiverr and Upwork. Sharing passwords with a technical person is a common practice when it comes to outsourcing. But if done incorrectly, your passwords can be exposed to a third party or a hacker.
To prevent this, I am going to outline some of the best practices when it comes to sharing passwords with your designer/developer. Especially when you are hiring them on a marketplace such as Fiverr or Upwork.
Give your developer access to your site without sharing the password
Many modern website builders such as Shopify, Wix builder, GoDaddy builder lets you give access to your site to a developer. Shopify even lets the developer build the shop in their own account and then transfer it to yours when the task is complete.
You just have to enter their username or email in your control panel and they are given developer access to your properties. This eliminates the need to give out your password.
When working with a self hosted WordPress.org website, you can simply create a new user account. Create the new account with admin privileges, and send that user credentials instead of your main one. Once they are done and handed you over the project, you can just simply delete their user account. This is a very convenient and safer option compared to sharing your password.
Use a password manager to share your passwords
When you can’t give access without giving them the password, you can use a password manager to do this for you. You can share it using LastPass. The developer will get an email message asking them to accept the share. They must already have a free LastPass account to use it.
When they accept your password sharing request, they can log in to that appropriate account without having to look at the actual password. This gives you extra security and will bring peace of mind. In fact, one of my client shared their password with me via Lastpass.
Don’t use the same password for all of your sites
Many internet users use the same password for all their internet accounts. If you expose one of them to a hacker, they will be able to get into all of your internet accounts.
For this reason you should use different passwords to use on different sites. A password manager such as LastPass can remember these passwords for you.
I use LastPass as my password manager tool. It has a chrome extension and it auto fills my passwords for various sites. You can generate secure passwords with it. You can also have it memorize all of your passwords.
Some extra caution
Often times passwords are shared via instant messages, emails or via text files. These passwords stay on someone’s computer for quite a while. So it’s better to change to a different password as soon as the development project is done.
Developers don’t usually steal client information, it’s the hackers and viruses which you should be worried about.
With all these tips I am sure you will be prepared when the next time you hire a freelance website developer.
Your Tasks:
- Update your email account, domain and website passwords
- Start using a password manager to generate and store your passwords
- Stop sharing passwords via instant messages