Freelancer is not giving login details

[#1]

Hi, what do i do if my freelancer dont hand over details for my website. For example my website wordpress admin login?
Is it possible for me to get that password or change it in another way?
He did move it to my own host, but i cant login to make someone else continue where he stopped.

A dispute has beenmade, bu he is now totally ignoring my messages and dont want to end the contract.

[#2]

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Denzil W wrote:
Hi, what do i do if my freelancer dont hand over details for my website. For example my website wordpress admin login?
Is it possible for me to get that password or change it in another way?
He did move it to my own host, but i cant login to make someone else continue where he stopped.

A dispute has beenmade, bu he is now totally ignoring my messages and dont want to end the contract.

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Has he been fully paid?

[#3]

His payment is not yet dued and we do have an dispute.

[#4]

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Denzil W wrote:
His payment is not yet dued and we do have an dispute.

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Until the freelancer is paid in full for the work done, they own the work.

[#5]

re: "Hi, what do i do if my freelancer dont hand over details for my website. For example my website wordpress admin login? Is it possible for me to get that password or change it in another way?"

It it possible?

It may be possible.

But I can assure you that Upwork does not have the password you are looking for.

You say this is a WordPress site? And the site is on your host?

If the site is on your host, then this means you have the root-level credentials necessary to access the hosting account using FTP/SFTP.

You should be able obtain necessary credentials (username/password) from config files on the server.

So you may not need any further help from the freelancer.

Aside from that, is there more to this situation than you described? Why would the freelancer do the work, turn the work over to you, but not provide the Wordpress admin login? Why was a dispute made?

[#6]

This is the dispute and we are 100% honest about all points stated:

quested a refund.
For the past 2 weeks we have had outstanding disagreements with our freelancer, He has been unreliable, we have had language problem even though he insist he understood good english, but he didn't, and a lot of hours and time has been wasted. Time we put on small things, that he misunderstood, that could have gone much faster and that we would not have needed to pay for. These problems made it difficult to get what we wanted in the job. We are outraged that he stop our clock from time to time in the middle of our ongoing sessions and leave for hours to attend to other jobs he has ongoing. But most of all we are disappointed with his lack of ability to finish the job we intend for him to do. He was not able to implement the functions we requested for the construction of our website even though he told us he was more than qualified for the task. Now we have paid out over 460USD to upwork for two weeks work and this money did not gain us much, that's why we were even sceptical to pay the first weeks payment, because we were not sure about his future activities and we made delay to this payment until we got a reminder from Upwork that insufficient funds on our account, which we purposely did to withhold that payment. -there has been only complications and far from what we intend for the looks and function of our website. i have told him on private WhatsApp message about our disappointment and concerns, and now I'm writing my complain here. (we have proof of this conversation with him). We demand to pay (ONLY) half 50% of the total balance of what he is charging us so we can re hire a new person to complete the job and implement the areas he failed to accomplish.

[#7]

re: "We demand to pay (ONLY) half 50% of the total balance of what he is charging us..."

So you already know why the freelancer did not provide you with the WordPress login password.

[#8]

Yes but that is not for him to decide. The 50% because of the lack of work done is either up to him or the upwork team.
If we have beed tricked that he is fluent in english, and professional and we DIDNOT get a working site, a site far from finnished and noting we realy wanted to be done he could not do because he lack the skills. You believe we should pay full?
We will now need someone to fix all his mistakes. Its only fair.

[#9]

re: “You believe we should pay full?”

I have not said anything about what I believe. It isn’t my intention to take sides in your situation.

But like I said earlier: Upwork does not have the password for your site.

Upwork does not create websites.

At this point, you may not need anything at all from Upwork and you may not need anything else from that freelancer. Have you asked another Wordpress expert to help you get the login credentials for the site on your server?

Because given the fact that Upwork itself does not create or fix websites, you only have three options for moving forward:

a) continue working with the original freelancer (assuming he is willing to help you, which may be doubtful at this point)

b) work with someone else

c) do the work yourself

And when we refer to the work, we mean:

a) continuing to use what the original freelancer set up for you

[or]

b) starting over from scratch

[or]

c) something in between, a combination of (a) and (b)

[#10]

Denzil:

I have been rereading your many notes about the freelancer and his work on your site.

Your lack of enthusiasm for his work is apparent.

Based on how you describe the freelancer and his work, would it surprise you if some people wonder why you want to use any of it?

[#11]

It is an hourly contract and you defaulted on payment (you failed to pay Upwork for the work...)

So you don't own any of the unpaid work that was done during the hours that were not paid.

If you default on payment your account is no longer in "good standing" and you lose the right to dispute assistance.

Hourly contracts are paid for the hours worked, not the end product, and yes, you are expected to pay for any hours logged, and can dispute based only on the work diary, not the quality or otherwise of the outcome.

You can't "demand back 50%" - especially not when you haven't actually paid the second week.

Unless you settle what you owe Upwork your account will be suspended (if it isn't already)

[#12]

I purposly took away the money from my account when i noticed that my freelancer was unwilling to carry out the full tasks requested by my team. If i have done wrong, then so be it. All i know at this point is that a freelancer should NOT take on a job if he cannot deliver. And if he cannot deliver then i should not have to pay in full and wait for my money to be reimbursed depending on if the upwork investigation goes in my favour. One of the most distressing thing with him was that he made the work hours longer and most of the things he did not understand how to do or fix, he kept asking us to explain, and after explaining for 2 hours, he finally fixed the problem based on the most difficult explanations.
Which leads us to believe 2 things. Either he already did understand in the first place and bought time to google and look up how to solve the problem on our clock, or that he use this method to perlong the work time on our clock. That is not okey. As a professional freelancer he should know simple resolutions like many of what me and him had. Because some even me my self who know little about wordpress told him what to do to solve the issues, solutions that he should have been able to figure out or know by himself.

[#13]

Denzil, I get it. The freelancer was a poor choice and you should have removed him as soon as you discovered that. (Paying him for the hours worked and being done with it,)

Defaulting on payment is not the way forward.

A dispute over an hourly contract is decided purely on whether the freelancer logged their hours correctly (tracked (not manual time), sufficient activity levels, screenshots showing work done on your project, meaningful work memos.)

BUT you defaulting on payment may mean you no longer qualify for dispute assistance anyway.

[#14]

I have no choice to use it. But before i go forth with this statenent. I should also outline that my website was more than already half done by my brother who because seriously sick and had to stop. This new frelancer in question took on the job stating that he was an expert in that feild and was willing to complete the page at an mutural agreed price per hour. With that said, i have no other choice to keep the work that is done, maybe not what has been modified, and even so, the modification i must keep aswel knowing that i have already paid him almost $500.

[#15]

Denzil, thanks for clarifying the situation.

Obviously there is a huge difference between wanting to continue using a site that your brother created and which another freelancer did some work on, versus wanting to use a completely new site that a freelancer created from scratch.

The main piece of advise I would give you is to put your project first. Don’t fixate on this one freelancer or the money paid to him or what he did. You need to move forward.

And regardless of what you do, you need to make sure you have a good source code and database backup and archive system in place. You need to make sure that there are automatic backups, and you need to make sure you have an archive or backup or version control that is accessible only to you.

What you don’t want to have is a situation in which somebody other then yourself can completely take control of your site, or a situation in which you lose everything if there is a technical issue and your server is lost.

You want to be able to restore a working version from elsewhere if necessary.

[#16]

Thank you. I have taken steps to do all this now. However i will need a bew frelancer to complete the job he could not do even tho it was not complicated fontions. Im so sad at this point.

[#17]

Denzil, I won’t rehash what Petra and Preston have discussed, but it’s a fairly simple task to change an existing WordPress administrator login username or password or create a new one outside of WordPress. However, it does require modifying the database with PHPMyAdmin or something similar so it’s best done by someone with prior experience.