How To Manage Your Team Using the 5 Common WordPress User Roles
The WordPress platform is one of the best-known website building tools in the world. As of 2021, it’s powering nearly 40% of all websites. The software is designed to help companies and individuals build and manage a website or blog regardless of their coding or designing skills.
WordPress empowers its customers to create multiple user profiles and logins. For companies and organizations, this feature in WordPress user management can be a useful way to collaborate on a website.
With multiple users, you can allocate various tasks to different team members or even outsource your blog to freelance writers and editors.
As the owner of a WordPress website, understanding the features of WordPress user management will help you maximize your website’s potential for collaboration, while keeping your content secure. This guide to WordPress user roles will show you how it’s done.
What we’ll discuss:
- The five common WordPress user roles
- Customizing user roles in WordPress user management
- Creating custom WordPress user roles
The Five Main WordPress User Roles
WordPress is designed with five main user roles built into the software. Each role comes with its own permissions.
Here’s a rundown of what each of the existing roles includes:
| Permissions | Administrator | Editor | Author | Contributor | Subscriber |
| Read site | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Edit posts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| Delete posts | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | – |
| Publish posts | Yes | Yes | Yes | – | – |
| Upload files | Yes | Yes | Yes | – | – |
| Publish pages | Yes | Yes | – | – | – |
| Delete pages | Yes | Yes | – | – | – |
| Edit pages | Yes | Yes | – | – | – |
| Read, edit, or delete private pages | Yes | Yes | – | – | – |
| Manage categories | Yes | Yes | – | – | – |
| Moderate comments | Yes | Yes | – | – | – |
| Activate plugins | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Create new users | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Delete plugins, themes, or users | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Edit files, plugins, themes, or users | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Export or import content | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Install plugins or themes | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Manage user options | Yes | – | – | – | – |
| Update themes, plugins, dashboard, or core | Yes | – | – | – | – |
Let’s take a look at each of these default user roles in more detail.
1. Administrator
As the administrator, you’ll have full permissions on the WordPress control panel. You’ll be able to publish, edit, and delete:
- Blog posts
- Webpages
- Themes
- Plugins
- Code
Administrators are also in charge of updating the permissions and roles of other users.
If you’re the website administrator, you’re running the show. This role is usually reserved for the website owner, who usually has a thorough understanding of how WordPress works.
The administrator gets a lot of responsibility, so it’s vital that you only give administrator permissions to people you trust with your entire website.
You may have come across the term “Super Admin.” A Super Admin is only a relevant user role option for the Multisite Network mode of WordPress.
Some companies own multiple WordPress websites. The Super Admin role is reserved for the user who has administrator permissions across all of them.
2. Editor
The editor has a significant number of permissions and is like the second-in-command to the administrator. A user with editor permissions can publish, edit, and delete blog posts and website pages.
However, unlike administrators, editors can’t change core components of the website such as the theme, plugins, or users.
If you have an assistant website administrator at your company, this may be a good role option for them.
3. Author
An author has minimal permissions but can do enough to run your website’s blog. This user role has the ability to edit, write, publish, and delete blog posts.
If your company has hired an external content publisher, consider giving them author permissions. This way, they can run your blog from day-to-day without having access to the rest of your website.
4. Contributor
Contributors have minimal user permissions but, as the name suggests, they are able to add new posts to the website’s blog. Contributors to the blog can write, edit, and delete posts. However, they cannot publish them.
The contributor role permissions are suitable for the website’s writers. This way, the author, editor, or administrator can approve upcoming posts prior to publication, editing, or deleting them as they see fit.
5. Subscriber
The subscriber is the default user role with the fewest permissions. As a subscriber, your only permission is to read content.
For blogs with an active, engaged following, this WordPress user role is a useful option that lets users create a username, comment on posts, and interact with other members.
How To Add and Remove Capabilities From Existing WordPress User Roles in WordPress User Management
If you are the website administrator, you’ll have WordPress user management permissions.
Being able to customize the permissions of all other users can be useful when you have a team member who doesn’t take on new responsibilities and needs access to specific areas of the control panel. It’s also a useful way to manage a fully remote team.
Here’s a step-by-step guide that will demonstrate how to edit specific permissions for your users using the User Role Editor plugin:
- In the left panel of your dashboard, select Users > User Role Editor.
- In the User Role Editor plugin, choose the user you want to edit from the dropdown menu.
- You’ll see the user’s full capabilities. If the format is difficult to read, select the option “Show capabilities in human readable” form.
- Scroll through the user’s permissions and check or uncheck the box next to the relevant permissions.
- Select Update when you’re ready to finalize your choices.
And that’s it. The user should immediately have access to their new permissions.
How To Create a Brand New User Role in WordPress User Management
In some cases, you may wish to save a template of a new type of WordPress user role.
For instance, let’s say you have a team of blog editors who need access to editing user roles so they can add new contributors to the team. However, you don’t want these editors to have a full level of access to the website’s plugins or themes.
Or, let’s say you hire a series of external freelance SEO consultants. You may wish to create a specific user role for these consultants that gives them permission to edit posts, but not publish or delete them.
In order to save this new role template in your system, we recommend creating a new custom user role.
This process can also be done within the User Role Editor plugin:
- In the left panel of the WordPress dashboard, select Users > User Role Editor.
- Find and select the option Add Role in the right-side panel.
- Write an ID and Display Role Name. This is the name of the user role type.
- If you want to start with a set of permissions from an existing role, head to the “Make copy of” dropdown menu.
- Edit the capabilities for the new role using the boxes next to each permission.
- When you’re satisfied with your choices, click Update.
Once you’ve completed these steps, your new user role should be ready to use and should appear in the list of available user roles when you register a new user.
WordPress New User Registration
WordPress New User Registration isn’t automatically available on WordPress websites. If you want users to be able to register themselves as “subscribers,” you have to follow a short series of steps in your WordPress dashboard.
- Head to Settings > General in WordPress admin.
- Find the Membership section.
- Check the checkbox next to Anyone can register.
- Select a default user role. Most administrators prefer to use the subscriber role as this has the smallest set of capabilities. However, you can also choose any of the other WordPress user roles, including customer user roles you have created yourself.
Once this option is set up, you can invite readers to join the community.
Creating a WordPress New User Registration option for your readers can be useful for a number of reasons, including to:
- Encourage a readership community.
- Create user-only private content to improve customer retention.
- Permit comments and discussion. Users make 77 million comments every month, so empowering your audience to do so is a great way to tap into this ready-made customer engagement.
- Monitor your loyal readers or customers for eCommerce websites.
- Show off your following by displaying your user count.
- Improve your employees’ experience at work by making sure they have access to everything they need.
If you dislike the idea of users creating their own accounts, keep this box unticked.
Instead, the Administrator will be the only one who can access full WordPress user management and add new users. While this can be more secure in practice, for some companies, it can prove tiresome and unnecessary.
As the administrator of a WordPress website, understanding WordPress user management is a vital part of your role.
By monitoring which users are assigned to which roles, you can seamlessly create a website team without worrying about your employees having too much or too little access to the WordPress dashboard.
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