As one of the most popular content management systems in the world, WordPress is used to power millions of sites ranging from small hobby blogs to international news publications.
When first starting out, you’d be forgiven for overlooking the importance of functionality such as ‘user roles’ in Wordpress. However, as your website grows and you wish to allow employees, agencies or guest bloggers to access your website and its content, the ability to control user access can quickly become very important.
In this guide we’ll be covering what user roles are, why they’re important and how to set them up for your website.
What are user roles in WordPress?
(and why you need them)
User management and permissions (sometimes referred to as ‘roles’) come as a standard component of the WordPress content management system.
It essentially allows you to give other people access to your website in a secure way, whereby they have their own username and password as well as a set of permissions which define what actions they can and cannot perform when logged into the backend of your website.
You may be thinking to yourself “can I not just share my login details if I need someone else to make changes to my website?” and yes you can, but this is bad practice and not recommended for several reasons.
The first is that you would be giving someone administrator-level access to your website, allowing them to add, edit and delete anything they want on your site.
In addition to this, if you have multiple users logging in, you will have no way of tracking which user has created which blog post/page on your website - different user accounts makes traceability and accountability infinitely easier.
The final key reason is that if you wish to revoke someone's access to your site in the future, you are able to simply remove their account from the system. In contrast, if everyone shared the same username/password, you would have to change this and then communicate the updated password to all other users!
Inviting users to your WordPress website
Now that you understand the importance of controlling user access in a managed way, let’s look at how this can be setup in WordPress. To view a list of everyone who has access to your site, login to the admin panel and click the ‘Users’ link on the left hand sidebar:














