When hiring a developer to work on your client’s sites, you will need to give them admin access to the website at the very least. Most times you will also need to provide hosting and FTP access to the site as well; but there are considerations to take when handing off this information.
For example:
- How much do you trust the developer? (If the answer to this question is not much, it may be time to find another developer who you trust. If they are going to be working on your client’s sites you really need to have a good relationship with them.)
- What kind of access do they need?
- How much control do you want?
- How involved do you want to be?
- Is there data within your hosting account that you don’t want them to have access to?
In most cases, I would make the developer their own login and give that to them rather then providing your username and password. This ensures that you will always have access and the ability to remove their account if needed.
There are a couple different ways we can approach giving access.
Hands off approach
This means you trust the developer implicitly. You are not worried about what they have access to and you just want to hand it over and let them take care of it. If this is what you want you just need to create an administrator user on your website for them and either create a user for them with your hosting or send them an invite to collaborate with you on your website through your hosting. How you add them to your hosting account will really just depend on who you use for hosting.
Oversight approach
For this one you will still create an administrator user on the website but maybe you only give them ftp access to your hosting and remote login to the database. This keeps most of your hosting information private but it may mean you have to do a little more if they need changes made on your hosting.
Hands on approach
This approach involves just giving them admin access to your website but requires them to work with you if they need anything done through ftp or hosting. This could potentially mean a lot more work for you and if something happens on the site and it goes down it also means they can’t immediately fix it through ftp because they are having to go through you.
A lot of this just depends on your level of comfort and trust. It’s also entirely possible you start with the third approach and work your way up as you work with your developer more and your relationship builds trust.
You will notice that every approach involves at least giving the developer their own admin access. Honestly, if you aren’t comfortable with this you probably shouldn’t be hiring them. If you can’t give them admin access they really aren’t going to be able to do their job well and you both are just going to end up very frustrated.
Do you have any questions or concerns? Anything you need help with? Reach out and let us know how we can help!
