This is a common scenario when you need to give your Developer access to your WordPress Dashboard. Sharing your own admin account is so back-dated and risky, and creating another account and managing that is also troublesome. But thanks to amazing WordPress Community (Especially my friend Drew Jaynes) we have a smart solution now.

Sometimes it could be theme developer or plugin developer, or even hosting support guys, that you might need to share Dashboard access for support purpose. You have 100% right to be skeptic, though probably 99% time it won’t have any risk. WordPress Community itself is obviously very giving and helps each other. If a free theme or plugin developer asked for Dashboard access for giving you support, this is already very generous for him. So doubting him also makes the situation looks weird. So, here we have a smart solution.

Problems with Old Method:

Before jumping into the solution lets talk about possible risk with old methods.

# Sharing your own admin account is always risky, it could be a complete mess if it been shared with wrong people, you could loose access completely.

# If you create a temporary admin account and share that, you have to remember, and manually remove that account or change pass. If you forget and that person ever goes to the dark side by any means you are absolutely screwed.

# And the fake emails for the temporary account is always weird! Yes, I know! Been there, done that!

Solution:

My suggestion and this guide is based on ‘Support Me‘ plugin by my friend Drew Jaynes.

Support Me

Support Me lets you handle support account securely. Take a look at their usages

• You can set support accounts to expire after a set number of minutes, hours, or days, or even not expire at all.
• Once a support account expires, it is automatically deleted.
• No more making up fake email addresses or dealing with the full user registration process. Just set an expiration, and generate an account.
• You can manage support account sessions just like any other user account.
• Easily see when Support Accounts expire in a new ‘Expires’ column on the Users screen

Details How-To:

If you are a developer you probably don’t need any more details. But this guide is also for normal WordPress user as well, so I will go into details step by step so anybody who have access to a WordPress dashboard could set this up.

1) Install: 

First we need to install “Support Me” plugin.

Go to Plugins => Add Plugins

Search for “support me” from the right search box

Now for the “Support Me”, click Install Now. Then the Activate button will appear, activate the plugin.

# Add A Support Account:

After the installation is complete, you may proceed to create Support Account.

Go to Users => Add Support Account

Select when you want that support account to expire. You could select the expire time from 1 Min to many days, or even never expire option as well.

As soon as you click “Add Support Account“, you will be in a page where you will see support account details like below –

You need to send that Username & Password URL to your Support Developer. Your Developer then will be able to set his own password and complete the support task, and the account will expire and delete after that designated time period.

You are done. It’s super easy, simple. In fact, you just need to send that Password URl to you developer. Your Developer will obviously get admin access, but for the time period you selected.

I want to finish off this tutorial by saying thanks to Drew Jaynes again. He has done so much for the WordPress community by contributing to the core and spending countless hour for this OpenSource community. This is just one more god work from him. Thank you my friend, you are awesome!