Do you find yourself staring at your screen while trying to login to a website and dread the invalid password message? Turns out you are not alone. A recent survey by ExpressVPN across 8000 users revealed some interesting stats on how often users forget their passwords and how much time they spend in a year while resetting them.
While forgetting and resetting passwords may not seem like a big deal, users seem to spend way too much time with something unproductive. This time could be better spent on something more meaningful or fun like flipping through your favourite magazine, playing some games or spending some quality time with your loved ones.
Why do we forget our passwords?
The sheer number of websites and applications users regularly use has grown exponentially over the years. This means users have to maintain a complex set of credentials in order to access these services. Due to increased focus on security, passwords have become very complicated and are harder to memorize. Each website or application has their own set of complex requirements for passwords these days, which is a pain to deal with. Very often users forget their passwords moments after creating them. This is why passwords managers have gained popularity and become a necessity for the digital era.
Time wasted on changing forgotten passwords
The survey, which was done across users in US, UK, France and Germany, found that it takes an average person around 3 minutes and 46 seconds to reset their password. Over 37% of users in the US take more than 4 minutes to change a password, and 7% of users spend over 10 minutes.
The results showed that 52% of respondents from the US, 53% from France, and 50% from the UK reset their passwords at least once a month. On the other hand, users from Germany seem to forget their passwords less frequently, as only 35% of them needed to reset their passwords at least once a month.
Banking passwords are the most commonly forgotten
Nearly 30% of users claimed online banking as the type of website or app for which they are most likely to forget their login passwords—more than social media (24%), online shopping (16%), utility sites and apps (9%), and online gaming (8%).
This means that when you want to login to your banking app urgently, you have most likely forgotten the password. This seems to be a consistent factor across users in the surveyed countries.
Surprisingly, only 7% of users claimed to have to rest work account passwords often. This could be because they are used daily, and password managers are used at companies.
Resetting a password is one of the most frustrating things
A slow internet connection is the only thing people find more irritating than resetting a forgotten password. To make things worse, most sites don’t allow you to use your old password again while changing your password.
Time wasted on changing passwords is better well spent on personal well-being
Here are some tasks users would prefer spending their time on if they don’t have to deal with resetting passwords.
- Spend time with family and friends (30%)
- Read a book (16%)
- Go for a short walk (14%)
- Do some life admin (12%)
- Try a new hobby (8%)
So, instead of dealing with fear, anxiety, and frustration that comes with forgetting a password, most users prefer to participate in activities that contribute towards mental and physical well-being.
The best way to track and manage your passwords
So what’s the best way to manage and remember your passwords?
The best way to deal with this is to use a password manager and not having to worry about remembering passwords at all. You just need to remember one password to access the password manager, and this takes so much stress off our lives for the digital nomads we have become.
Passwords have become complex over the years and are often are a crazy combination of symbols, numbers and alphabets. It is virtually impossible to remember these passwords. Experts recommend using strong, unique passwords which are at least 17 characters long. If you are not using a password manager to securely store and organise your passwords, consider using one.
How often do you forget your password and end up creating a new password? How often do you get locked out of an important website or app?
Let us know in the comments below.