Working With a Developer

There may be situations when you wish to hire a developer to help you work on your website. This guide shares tips you’ll need to know when working with a developer for your WordPress.com site.

Some examples of the types of projects that developers can help you with are:

• Third-party theme installation and customization
• Third-party plugin installation and customization
• CSS customization
• Custom PHP coding
• Custom theme and plugin development
• Site migration
• Full website development

If you prefer to hire a developer to modify your site, you can invite them to be an administrator on your site.

The administrator role has full access to modify your site. Therefore, once your developer has finished working on your site, we suggest removing them as a user until the next time you need their assistance.

When adding the developer to your site, you can mark them as a contractor, freelancer, consultant, or agency to help keep track of who you’re adding to your site and why.

Once the developer you’re working with completes the work, we recommend revoking their access to your site.

To remove a developer’s access, follow these steps:

1. Visit your site’s dashboard.
2. Navigate to Users → All Users.
3. Delete the user.

On plugin-enabled sites, you should also reset SFTP credentials and database access.

1. Visit your Sites list in the dashboard.
2. Click on the title of the site in the list of your sites.
3. Navigate to the Settings tab.

4. Click the SFTP/SSH section.
   • Or, from your sites list, press ⌘K on Mac or Ctrl+k on Windows and Linux and use the Hosting Command Palette to search for “Reset SFTP/SSH password”.

5. Click the “Reset password” button to reset the SFTP/SSH credentials.
   • Resetting the SFTP/SSH credentials will not reset your account password.

If you are a freelancer or agency customizing someone else’s website on WordPress.com, the following information explains features available depending on your client’s hosting plan.

Developers can visit https://wordpress.com/me/developer and switch on the “I am a developer” toggle to opt into previews of new developer-focused features.

WordPress.com websites include WordPress.com Log In to allow site access via your WordPress.com account, in addition to local users who can log in through /wp-admin. WordPress.com Log In can be enabled or disabled as needed. Visit Configure Your Site’s Log In Access to learn more.

Included on all of our WordPress.com hosting plans: Take your site from HTTP to HTTPS at no additional cost. We encrypt every domain registered and connected to WordPress.com with a free SSL certificate.

Extend and customize WordPress to build anything you can imagine, including:

• Use the built-in CSS editor to add CSS overrides to change a theme’s style and layout.
• Install from over 50,000 plugins and receive automatic updates.
• Upload third-party themes and create child themes.

Run WP-CLI commands, automate repetitive tasks, and troubleshoot your custom code with the tools you already use.

Test changes on a WordPress.com staging site first, so you can identify and fix any vulnerabilities before they impact your live site.

Speed up your development workflow and take version control further by connecting your WordPress.com sites and GitHub repos. Choose from fully automatic or on-demand deployments.

Secure and maintain your site effortlessly with real-time backups, advanced malware scanning and removal, and continuous site monitoring—ensuring peak performance and security at all times.

Whenever you’re stuck, whatever you’re trying to make happen—our Happiness Engineers have the answers.

Learn more about the features we’ve created just for developers through our WordPress.com Developer Documentation, and sign up for the WordPress.com Blog (by clicking the Subscribe button in the bottom-right corner) to stay up to date on the latest features and launches.