How to Manage User Access on Your Website

WordPress websites provide endless opportunities to customize your website with a user role management system to manage multiple users on your site. Keeping your site secure and safe starts with managing access to your site and what that user has the ability to post. Knowing how to manage your user roles and permissions is very important as your WordPress website continues to grow.

Here are the types of user permissions to manage within your WordPress website and how you can change and remove them as needed.

Types of WordPress Users

You can create multiple users for your WordPress site and give each user a different role based on the type of permissions you want them to have. Since WordPress code can easily be edited by anyone who can open it, restricting permissions to your site is important.

There are five categories of WordPress users

1. Administrator 

2. Editor

3. Author 

4. Contributor 

5. Subscriber

How to Manage User Access

Now that we’ve covered the types of users you can add to your site, you should follow these steps in order to create a new user in WordPress.

1.) Log into your WordPress Dashboard. From the main left menu, choose “Users,” and select “All Users.”

2.) You will arrive at your user screen where you can hover over “Change role to…” to adjust the permissions of a specific user. 

3.) Select the desired role and click “Change,” to apply it to a specific user.

If you have multiple user roles to edit, you can use the Bulk Action tab underneath and select “Apply,” to change them in one swift action.

How to Remove User Access

4.) If you would like to remove a user from your site, you will click on “Bulk Actions,” and then select “Delete,” to remove them.

Each user role has its own set of permissions that control how that user interacts with your site and updating the permission is essential to the security of your website. As you get comfortable managing the existing user roles on your website, you’ll be able to seamlessly interchange the permissions as your website grows. WordPress also has the capability to customize your user permissions outside of the default user roles with plugins.