Why Using Third Party Sign in on your Website is a Good Idea

Ever forgotten a password?

Sure you have, and you can bet your customers suffer from the same problem every now and then. You don’t want that happening mid-way through a potential purchase on your website.

If you can, you also don’t want to wary them with yet another username and password combination to remember.

A widely-accepted and increasingly popular solution for this problem is to use Third Party Sign In or “Single Sign-on” using OpenID, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google and more.

Third Party Sign In allows you to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create a new password. This will enable you to visit a site faster by authenticating them with a single click, with no need for them to recall a password (unless they are signed out of the service you are using for third party authentication).

For the sample image above (see LiveJournal’s Third Party Sign In), it just needs your OpenID URL, or your Facebook, or your Twitter logins to access your LiveJournal account.

The associated account, i.e. your Twitter account in LiveJournal website, should have settings in it wherein you can remove or revoke the access to your LiveJournal account. (see image number 2 above).

However, not all people feel secure sharing their Facebook logins to multiple sites and they opt for a traditional login.

The site should still have an option to create an account directly on their site by creating a unique username, password and associated email address, such as the third sample image above for Digg.

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This post was by Alex, project coordinator at WeMakeWebsites. We are e-commerce and Drupal experts based in Clerkenwell, London.