Website Hell: Forgotten Usernames and Passwords Will Kill Your Business 💀

Hello, it's Darren from Ilkeston Web Design. Now this is an important video and I really want you to pay attention to this because this might not have happened to you but we want to avoid this ever happening.

This is about how forgotten passwords kill businesses.

Building a website is complex. It relies on multiple third-party tools and services, the most obvious of which is web hosting, domain, email, but there will be other services as well depending on what kind of website is being built. The question is who is: keeping track of all of this information, all these emails, usernames, passwords... where is that kept?

So, here's a typical story...

Somebody approaches a web design company, agency, freelance – whatever – and says, "We've got a website, we need to rebuild it, we need to relaunch it. How do we do that?" And first question is, "Well, do you have access to your domain registrar account or your web hosting account? Do you have access to the WordPress dashboard?"

And then the business owner sort of goes, "Mmm, I don't know any of that. I can't remember the passwords. I've got no idea."

What's happening is: the website is running, it's online, but nobody knows who's hosting it, who's got the passwords, how much they're paying, how to access any of this stuff... and it's a bottleneck and a headache.

Really what it is, is – and this isn't always the business owner's fault, but the business owner is responsible so they need to choose more carefully when they engage the services of a web designer – it's an example of bad communication and ultimately it's a failure to plan ahead.

Really you want passwords all on one page that can all live in a central location.

Now a digital Word document is best because then you can print it out and you can keep these passwords in a safe. Obviously, if any of the passwords change, they need to be updated.

But I personally would recommend that you keep all this stuff in a Word document because some of these passwords can be long and difficult to remember. You're not supposed to be using easy to-guess-passwords, so you want to put all this stuff inside a Word document and then you can password protect the Word document with one password. So it's one password to open a document in order to see all of the passwords, because, let me tell you, if someone else is holding on to all this stuff and you don't have a goddamn clue, that's a bad strategy.

Well, let's imagine that the person who is responsible for holding on to all these passwords dies. What then?

Does all that knowledge die with that person? So at the very least, you as a business owner, you need to have access to this stuff because you might need to engage the services of a web designer and you're going to need to give them a document with all the passwords so that they can get on with their job.

The question is: can you gain access to your own web hosting account, just as a thought experiment? I'm not saying you need to go and do that right away, but if you had to, could you do it?

Here's a scenario: imagine your debit card is lost or stolen.

After your bank issues you with a new card, you're going to have to go through the process of updating your payment details everywhere for your web hosting, your domain email, and any plugins or extensions that you've paid for as part of your website.

Here's a story, and I hate this story, I'm going to tell it anyway, and it's not quite what we're talking about, but it illustrates the point. Gabriel Arbed, 34, an entrepreneur from Barbados, lost around 800 bitcoin, now worth around $25 million when a colleague reformatted a laptop that contained the private passwords to his bitcoin wallet in 2011.

And that's from an article on the New York Times called, "Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortune". How much time and money do you think that person spent trying to regain access to their bitcoin wallet?

Not quite the same thing, but there's money at stake here, and it doesn't matter how much money you're making in your business, I mean, you can't afford for these little mistakes to be allowed to happen. There's enough to think about without being derailed by something as obvious as a goddamn forgotten password. It's a bit like locking yourself out of your own house.

The good news is, if you've done all this, and you've put all this in place, if your trusted web designer, web developer, whoever it happens to be, if they get crushed by a falling piano or trampled to death by angry cattle, they're replaceable.
There's not as much to worry about, because with this password document at your disposal, the wheels of your business keep turning, you save time, you save money, you avoid potential headaches and stress.

So my recommendation is hire someone who actually thinks about these things, somebody who thinks ahead on your behalf and helps prevent small issues turning into disasters.

If you have a business problem that involves your website, visit IlkestonWebDesign.com and we'll see if I can help you.