Giving freelancers access to Wordpress

[2076e2c0]

I've posted a job regarding my WordPress theme I need help with but before hiring a freelancer from Upwork I would like to know how safe is it for me to give freelancers access to my WordPress panel?

[nikola-stojkovic]

Hi 🙂

It's always the gamble with letting someone you don't know to access your System (whatever the may be), or if the Freelancer doesn't have enough of the positive feedback, or they are new on UW. However, there are many ways you can actually be safe with such stuff. you could create a demo instance of WP for specific job, or you could use one of many plugins that allow creating Administrator users that have limited/controlled access to the WP core admin features. Some of them even let you create per-user permissions, for example - deny access to the plugins list, deny changing settings, allow only access to the theme and so on.

Better be safe than sorry 🙂

[yitwail]

There are freelancers who are crooks as well as freelancers who are incompetent, but most freelancers with a history of succesfully completed jobs are neither. (I say most because it's been reported that some freelancers will buy the profile of an experienced freelancer.) 

Besides what Nikola suggested, make a full site backup before you hire anyone, and export the backup to your computer and some offsite storage like google drive or dropbox. That way, if worst comes to worst, you should be able to restore the site.

[prestonhunter]

Anida:

Most Upwork freelancers are very professional and you are very safe giving them access to your WordPress panel.

But as others in this thread have pointed out, not ALL of them are honest or competent.

You should have backups of your system ANYWAY, regardless of if you are hiring freelancers or not.

If you hire freelancers to work on potentially sensitive or damageable aspects of your system, you should have a backup that they can't get to.

Just to be safe. You probably won't need it. But you're better off having it in case you end up being one of those very rare cases where something goes wrong.

Don't put your business and your sanity at risk by not having secure, usable, verified backups.