Tackling My Tangled Web of Passwords: Before & After Securing Strategies for Success

Key Takeaways

• Browser-based password managers can lead to fragmented logins on multiple devices, which is confusing and frustrating.
• Switching to a third-party password manager can consolidate and organize passwords across all devices.
• Consolidating password managers may be time-consuming, but it improves security and makes it easier to manage accounts.

Password managers built into browsers seem great until one of your devices doesn’t support it. I condensed everything into one third-party password manager instead, and here’s how it went.

A bit back, I decided I was done with browser-based password managers. While a password manager built into Google Chrome was very handy initially, all my logins became extremely fragmented. I had a personal and professional Chrome profile, and the password manager didn’t transfer passwords 1:1 to my smartphone. Then, I bought an iPad and had Apple Passwords to keep track of, too. If I made a random secure password on one device, it was a coin flip on whether I could get that same login and password to work on another, and it led to me just using the same four or five passwords—which ruined the point of these managers in the first place.

When I switched to Firefox and realized I’d have to deal with another password management system, I’d had enough. I purchased a premium version of Bitwarden (which I used in the past for an organization and knew worked well) and imported all my passwords from all the managers. It showed me just how messy my password management had gotten.

It’s fast to import everything from my previous managers into Bitwarden, but much slower to go through over 400 records. Over a month after moving everything, I’m still working on cleaning everything up. But that’s the thing—now I can actually find my accounts, clean them up, and categorize them. When I’m done, I won’t be left wondering what is a legitimate password and what’s something from five resets ago.

Better still, Bitwarden tells me which of my passwords has been exposed via a simple report, and it’s easy to go to the login and change it to something more secure. Admittedly, this is something Google’s and Apple’s password managers do, but since they don’t integrate seamlessly with all my devices, it was often futile to change passwords to something randomized that I wouldn’t remember when I tried to log in somewhere else.

Don’t get me wrong, though—cleaning up everything is very slow. I have to decide if I want to change the password for a site login or if I want to delete the account entirely (if I can), then go to the site itself to do either. If I have a lot of logins for the same service saved, I have to figure out which is the right one and condense the records in a way that makes sense without deleting important information. I also like changing the name to something that makes more sense (the default name for many of these uploaded logins was the URL) and separating them into folders based on what they are used for. This doesn’t take too long for one login, but multiply the time taken by 400, and it will be a while before I’m done cleaning everything up.

All that said, was moving everything into Bitwarden and cleaning up my logins worth it? To me, it was. Seeing all of these accounts I’ve opened over the years that I long since forgot about and how often some of those passwords are exposed reminded me just how important internet security is.

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