Signing in

Three ways in, one account, and no password to forget.

Coming back

Whatever you used to sign up — Google, Apple, or an email address — use it again and you land in the same account. You can add the other routes later from your profile, and adding one does not take the others away.

A provider button is only drawn when it is fully configured, so a button you can see is a button that works.

Use the same email address

This is the one thing worth being careful about, because it is easy to trip over and there is no warning at the time.

An account is its email address. Sign up by email and later press Continue with Google on the same address and the two are joined automatically — one account, one set of sites.

But sign in with an address the account has never seen, and you get a new, empty account rather than a refusal. Three ways that happens without anybody doing anything strange:

• Apple’s Hide My Email gives us a relay address, which will not match the one you typed when you signed up.
• Your Google account is on a different address from the one you signed up with.
• Gmail ignores dots in addresses and we do not, so a.lice@gmail.com and alice@gmail.com are two accounts here and one inbox at Google.

If you sign in and your sites are missing, you are almost certainly in the second account rather than looking at a site that has vanished. Sign out, sign in the original way, and everything is where you left it.

There is no password reset

Deliberately. Press “Can’t log in?” and we email you a one-time sign-in link: press it and you are in.

A reset flow makes you invent a new password at the worst possible moment — locked out, in a hurry — and that is how people end up with a password they cannot remember next time either. A link that signs you in solves the actual problem, which is getting back to your site.

The link is single-use. Asking for another invalidates the one before it.

Setting a password

You do not need one. If you want one, set it from your profile once you are signed in, and change it in the same place.

That is the only place a password is ever set. There is no screen that asks you to choose one while you are locked out, because that screen is the reset flow this product does not have.

Confirming your address

No session starts until the address on the account is confirmed. Sign in with Google or Apple and that has already happened. Sign up by email and the confirmation is in your inbox.

It is not optional and it is not a formality: an account that can be made without a real address is one a script can make ten thousand of, and there are free credits attached to each one. See Create an account.