The WordPress Website Owner’s Emergency Checklist

The WordPress Website Owner’s Emergency Checklist

Reader Comments (48)

  1. This is a really nice checklist, my hosting account just got hacked and I am moving all my wordpress sites to a new hosting account and I think this checklist will be very helpful, I have downloaded it thank you.

    I like the conan o’brien animated image as well its funny

    • Glad you like the GIF! I take pride in always having animated GIFs at the ready for any social media or blogging situation. πŸ˜‰

      And I’m glad you find the checklist helpful. It’s a simple thing but it can pay such huge dividends down the road.

    • One of my websites got hacked a month ago also. This checklist is a must for that very reason! When you get hacked you need to change everything and having a record kept offline is probably the safest.

      I think adding to the emergency checklist would be ‘backups’ of your entire site. Most hackers now-a-days are inserting code into the website to promote their agenda. That’s what happened to me and having a backup gave me peace of mind. Having this checklist will double that peace of mind πŸ™‚

  2. This is so simple, yet so brilliant.
    It would also be great if web peeps would use this and provide it to their clients… all filled out. I cannot tell you how many hours are often wasted looking for and tracking down this stuff with new clients.

    Cheers and thanks for the doc!!

    • Thanks Bob! I’m hoping everyone looks at it like you do and sees how useful this can be. And it *should* only take a few minutes to fill out, but it can save so much time in the future.

      • Can I third and carry the motion?

        This is not only brilliant, but I am a huge fan of anything that is organized and simplistic, not just for myself, but also for my clients.

        A colossal kudos Jerod, this made my morning a bit brighter.

        • Well, you reciprocated, because your comment made my morning brighter as well. It’s great to see so many people immediately noticing the value of the checklist and putting it to use. That was the idea!

  3. Spending hours on the phone with the registar’s “help” desk to recover this information should qualify as torture. My clients pay me well to develop and deploy websites. If I’m sitting on hold and I’m on the clock, it’s gonna cost you. If I have to drill into the WordPress database to create a new admin, it’s gonna cost you. Maybe the title of the post should be, “Save Time and Money with a Single Piece of Paper.”

    • Tony, spot on. I’ve seen migrations delayed by 60 days due not having this information. When it really gets ugly, I’ve seen business owners having to contact ex-partners to get releases so that accounts can be reset, etc. Not having critical information can definitely cost time and money.

  4. This is a fantastic idea — I’ll be adding something like this to every client’s documentation. Thanks for sharing!

    • What’s mind blowing is how many folks unfortunately do not have this info at the ready when it’s needed. It’s our hope that spreading this sheet around will fix a bit of that.

  5. Excellent timing. I was just doing this as my second task of the evening and this was the second email I opened Voila!

  6. You are tops Jerod and thanks for saving me with such nice and informative checklist! WordPress sites serves the best for me and with it, I have hope my this checklist will be very helpful, thank you!

  7. Thanks for this! And if you write down important website information like this, then why not other things like Google Analytics info and the like? Not sure how I’m meant to write my nameservers on only one line though.

    • Well, you’re supposed to write really, really small of course. πŸ™‚ That’s not a bad suggestion though. Perhaps we’ll redesign it in the future.

      And yes, keeping ALL account information recorded is important. We wanted to keep this to a one-pager and include just the truly essential stuff. But you can’t ever go wrong being meticulous about account records.

  8. HI Jeroid! Excellent post and really love reading the post and I must appreciate your effort to elaborate to define all the major points simply and also provided the checklist.

    Thanks for sharing !

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