You’ve decided to work with us – we are very excited, and we hope you are too! Now comes the fun part, providing us with access to your website.

Unfortunately, we can’t help you with anything until we can log into your website and web hosting environment. Finding this information can be tricky, as there can be overlap, and often people are unclear on exactly who is hosting what for them. To make the collection processes more confusing, there are accounts and situations where you may not want us to have access. So sorting through it all can be a challenge. Below is a list of what we ask for and why. There are a few“must haves,” along with some “nice to haves” and we’ll do our best to clarify the difference.

A word about security

First off, please NEVER email us any of your passwords or ANY confidential information. We take security very seriously and want to ensure that anything you give us is protected at all times. Emailing passwords is frankly just dangerous, so we provide a couple of options for getting your information to us. For security purposes we give those options, along with our data collection worksheet, in the intro email, we send to kick off the onboarding process.

The second important point is – we prefer that you invite us to your site rather than send us your username and password. It is not always possible to set us up with a unique login, but in the case of WordPress (for example), we would prefer you create an account for us and send us that information then send us your own username and password. We also provide information on how to do that in your onboarding email.

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Logins we will need if you work with us:

Access to your Content management system:
If you are using WordPress, then WordPress is your CMS, and we obviously need to be able to login into your dashboard to be able to help you. Other examples of content management systems are Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify, so if you use one of those, then we need to be able to log into those systems as well. We cannot do anything without admin level access to your site.

Access to your Web Hosting Control Panel
This gives us full access to manage your web site. The critical piece here is that it allows us to access your database, and to adjust the server settings for your website. It also can help us to set up our own accounts to cover some of the items below. Without control panel logins we, again, are handicapped in the type of development edits we can make and in how much of your site we can restore should there be any problems.

SFTP, FTP, SSH:
This is login access to the server your website lives on. If you give us access to the web hosting information above, you do not need to server access since we can set it up in your hosting account. If you do not want to provide logins to your host, you have to give us this.
Without server access, we will not be able to make development edits to your site and will be handicapped in our ability to provide backups, server level scans, and some essential elements of support.

The ability to update your DNS:
This is the account that manages your domain and where your domain points. You do not have to give us this, and most of the time we do not need or want a direct login to make these changes. If You want us to make updates to your domain, launch new sites for you, etc. then you will probably want to give us a login. However, what we need in any situation is contact information for whom we should talk to if DNS changes are required. We do not need to be able to make changes on our own, but it is a great help if we can quickly get in touch with someone that can if a change is required.

Access to your Domain Registrar:
Your registrar is the account that owns your domain and therefore the keys to your kingdom. If you are not comfortable giving us this information, we are perfectly fine with that; often we prefer it that way. Be sure to keep the billing information up to date, and please be sure YOU own this account. If the developer who built your last site set this up for you – have ownership transferred to you. You can always create a new website, but if your domain expires and someone else buys it – there is nothing we can do. Note that if we don’t have this information, there are certain things that we can’t help you with, and so there may be situations where we do in fact need this information. However, in most cases, we can live without it.

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