“She asked me to call her on the weekend. That’s not normal.”
Sometimes as site care consultants, we may think that what we do doesn’t matter, or worse, we feel like others don’t think that we matter, but the truth is, we save our clients a lot of heartache!
To illustrate this truth, I’m going to share a story with you of a time I saved my client some heartache and helped her breath a sigh of relief.
Defending Her Digital Fortress: A Site Care Consultant’s Tale of Resilience
It was a weekend, and I rarely checked my email. In fact, sometimes I go through an entire Saturday without looking at my email. [Go ahead, pat me on the back.]
I pride myself on that, but I peeked on Sunday and saw more than one email from my client. One had something to do with changing the password on my client’s Facebook profile. When I looked at the last email, she sounded a bit distressed.
So, I took a breath and made the call on a late Sunday afternoon.
My client told me a story about someone on Facebook harassing her. These kinds of things have happened before, but this was new.
Apparently, the guy (we think) was blasting her and when she blocked him, he would pop up with another account. He was relentless. She believed the guy hacked into her Facebook profile and her email. I could never confirm that.
In the process of all this, he threatened to hack her website, and she believed he could because of what she had experienced.
So, she was getting me up to speed and then she said, “Can you protect my website, or am I going to need to pay for someone else to help?”
That question stopped me in my tracks. I could tell that it was serious for her. In the back of my mind I said, “Okay Todd, you get paid to care for her website. Now is your chance to prove it.”
I told her I would look at things first and let her know. I didn’t want to promise something I couldn’t do, but I knew I had already put some things in place because she was on my site care plan.
So, I logged into her site and looked at the logs in my iThemes Security plugin (now SolidWP). Yup, there were some attempts to login from an unknown person. There were several attempts, in fact, in a short period.
Thus far, despite multiple attempts, they were unsuccessful.
So I went into my iTheme Security and looked at the settings. I knew I could lock it down more. I limited login attempts more; I changed the login URL from the obvious, and I installed 2 factor authentication.
Until now, I was the only one who logged into her website. I had two accounts, an admin and one for her, but she had never logged in. All passwords were very strong.
Then I told her I made it more secure and that I would watch it closely for the next few days.
Over the next couple of days, I watched the site closely. After a couple of days, the attempts subsided.
I breathed a sigh of relief but also remembered I had done some of the best things a site care consultant can do to keep a website safe.
Some Observations from this event.
- In crunch time, site care consultants matter.
Let nothing keep you from feeling your value as a site care consultant. When things become complicated, we are there to help! - Most of the time, the client doesn’t have problems. That means we are doing our job!
It’s easy to think that when there are no problems, maybe they don’t need us. But many of you have told me that every time a client leaves, they end up having problems. Then they often come back to us for help! We must remind ourselves and our clients that nothing happening is good news! - Tools like MainWP and iThemes Security help us do our jobs better! Embrace them.
Never think a tool is a shortcut. They are not. They help us do our jobs more efficiently. After all, when is the last time you have logged into a dozen websites one at a time to update the plugins? Thank you MainWP! - There will always be someone trying to hack into our sites. Prepare for it.
Always be prepared for an invasion. Wondering where to start with your WordPress Security? Check out our Security Roundtable articles from last year.
WordPress Security Roundtable: Preventing compromises for your WordPress website
WordPress Security Roundtable: Using backups and updates to keep sites secure
Wrapping it up
This story happens every single day all across the MainWP Kingdom. MainWP users are busy saving sites like they are members of the MainWP Avengers!
We are more valuable to our customers than we realize sometimes, and often more so than they realize. No news is good news! So, as we wrap this up, and the storm is coming, MainWP Avengers, Assemble!
Do you have a similar story? Let us know in the MainWP Users Facebook Group.
