Challenge
A financial services firm runs a WordPress portal for more than 2,600 independent advisors. From that portal, advisors click through into a vendor’s platform using a single sign-on plugin built by a previous developer.
The vendor changed its security requirements and announced that the sign-in method the portal relied on would be retired.
Once the vendor switched off the old method, every advisor would lose access at the same time. The firm needed a replacement in place before that happened, and it needed the cutover to be invisible to advisors.
Solution
84EM built a custom WordPress single sign-on plugin on the vendor’s new sign-in service. An advisor clicks the same link they always have and lands exactly where they landed before. The new plugin was a drop-in replacement. The firm did not edit a single page, and nothing had to be announced to advisors.
The integration was tested on a copy of the portal, then on the firm’s staging site, then on the live site, each time against the vendor’s live environment with a real test account. It went live with no downtime.
Day-to-day control moved out of code and into the WordPress admin. The firm’s staff can update the vendor connection, change the link wording, and set the plain-English message an advisor sees for each kind of failure, all without a developer.
Key Capabilities
- Failure log. Every failed sign-in is recorded with its reason, and a portal-wide problem is flagged differently from a single advisor’s problem.
- Email alerts on outages. Staff are notified when sign-ins start failing, with repeated failures grouped so an outage produces one alert rather than hundreds.
- Admin-controlled messaging. The message an advisor reads for each failure type is set in a settings screen, and the vendor connection credential can be replaced there too.
- Automated safeguards. The link cannot be redirected to an outside website, and 124 automated checks run against a real WordPress environment before any future change ships.
Results
Advisors noticed nothing. The link they click, the wording, and the destination are unchanged, and the cutover happened with zero downtime and zero page edits. The retired sign-in method was switched off the same day.
Failed sign-ins went from invisible to diagnosed in under a minute. Before, a report from an advisor started a round of guessing between the firm, the portal, and the vendor. Now the firm’s staff open one screen and see whether the problem is one advisor or everyone, and whether the fault sits with the vendor or the portal.
The firm no longer waits on a developer for routine changes. Replacing the vendor connection credential, rewording the link, or changing an error message is a settings-screen edit.
The integration is the firm’s to keep. It ships with its automated tests, a step-by-step cutover and monitoring record, and no recurring license, so any future maintainer has everything they need.
