Hi all, I really need some advice.
I’m making a website through Divi and hired a freelance wordpress developer on craigslist to help me with some basic but frustrating things I couldn’t do. We met over Zoom to talk about them and he tried doing some of them but wasn’t really able to, and I had to show him how to use and troubleshoot Divi. The communication between us has been difficult as I’ve shown exactly what I need but he hasn’t been able to deliver or understand what I’ve been saying. In fact my site looks worse.
I already paid him half upfront for that work, and would pay him the second half when the project was complete.
I just sent him an email saying I don’t want to work with him anymore but I’d be happy to pay him a small fee for the minor work he’d done since. I haven’t gotten a reply yet but a few minutes after sending the email I’ve seen that all my styling is gone from my live site and the images won’t load. The styling is still the same in the Divi page builder, but completely gone from the live site. This hasn’t happened before.
I’m freaking out since I spent a really long time working on this website and I don’t know if this is something to panic about, something intentional, or a small and normal wordpress issue that’s easy to fix.
Any advice would be so helpful and appreciated.
**Update**: I reset my password. Tried logging on and it said the password was incorrect. Created a new password from email and got in. Paid to have back ups on my site and got the previous version back.
When he last worked on the site, something weird happened where I’d update the site in Divi, but no changes would appear in the live site. Now that I’ve backed it up I can.
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Check your hosting for a backup. Some hosts have automatic daily backups. You can just roll back to yesterday.
And remove his user account
Do you still need help to finish up?
Also change / update Cpanel, FTP and DB access
Also make sure he does not have your hosting credentials or your WordPress credentials and what a lot of people always fail to mention. Absolutely make sure he never had access to SFTP OR FTP, This is a must and if he did have access, and not being familiar with the htaccess file or the wpconfig file as a beginner.
Honestly I would recommend deleting the entire WordPress install and creating a new one. But first make sure he did not have the FTP or SFTP access.
Also there are many opinions out there but I personally not a fan of DIVI at all, If I were you look at Astra Pro or Generate Press.
Man this sounds like a nightmare. So what you’d want to do is contact your hosting provider and tell them to lock out his account and any other related ones, so that there’s no more damage. They can blacklist his IP and you can delete his accounts from cPanel or Plesk or whatever hosting server they have. If you don’t know how to do this you can just contact support and they should help you out
I’m a freelancer, but I can’t even offer my help here, it just feels wrong. I would recommend hiring your next dev either personally or on Upwork. Then set milestones. Never pay 50/50. Upwork will take care of you, but if you do this personally, make sure there’s a legal contract
For example, I’m currently building a website for a client thro Upwork. I get paid by milestone. My client has to approve the milestone in order for me to get paid
He had some issues and didn’t have enough time to green light the latest milestone, so Upwork terminated the contract and I gladly refunded him the $150 he had in escrow because I trust him and know we’ll just make a new contract soon. This is a good way to always be safe
Best wishes, truly 🤍