When your website’s content grows over the time and there are more than one person required to manage the website content, articles and posts, WordPress site User Roles are very important.

In this guide, let’s take a look at the five different WordPress user roles provided by Wordpress Out-of-Box and the different levels of permission you can assign, and consider when you might choose these different roles.

Purpose of Wordpress User Roles

User roles are designed to allow multiple people to collaborate on a single WordPress site. Each of these users needs permission to make changes on your site, and the user roles limits the ability of what they can do with the content or Wordpress site settings.

As mentioned earlier, Wordpress installation comes with 5 user roles Out-of-box and additional roles can be defined using plugins.

Adding Users to Wordpress Website

To add a user to your WordPress sign, log in to your WordPress dashboard and select Users > Add New. You will be presented with a form to fill out. Choose their role in the drop-down box.

Wordpress User Management Roles

  • Subscriber A Subscriber can be anyone who interacts with your WordPress site. For example, if you want people to register before they can comment on your site, they will register as a Subscriber.

  • Contributor If you want to review a content creator’s posts before they are published, assign them the Contributor role. They will be able to write and manage their own posts but can’t publish them.

  • Author An Author can create, publish and manage their own posts, but not content that other people create. This role should be used if you have a writer who you trust to publish their own content without going through another person.

  • Editor They can create, publish and manage their own posts, but they can also manage posts creating by others. Give this role to someone who will be managing all of your content creators.

  • Admin This role can do essentially anything on your Wordpress website and have access to a lot of backend capabilities like Wordpress Dashboard.

Simplifying the Roles and Responsibilities

User Role / Access Level Subscriber Contributor Author Editor Admin
Read Posts ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Edit & Delete Post   ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
Publish Post     ✅ ✅ ✅
Edit & Delete published Post     ✅ ✅ ✅
Publish & Delete Pages       ✅ ✅
Edit Other’s Post &Pages       ✅ ✅
Delete Other’s Post & Pages       ✅ ✅
Read, Edit & Delete Private Pages       ✅ ✅
Manage Plugins         ✅
Manage Themes         ✅
Create Users         ✅
Access Admin Dashboard         ✅