Manage Users or Authors in WordPress

You can create new user accounts to your WordPress website. This allows other people to publish content or help administer your site.

Add New Users

Navigate to Users → Add New. You’ll see the screen below.

The Add New User screen

Fill in the required user details and select a Role for the user. Click the Add New User button to complete the steps.

User Roles

WordPress uses roles to control what privileges the user has on the site.

Allowed ActionsAdministratorEditorAuthorContributorSubscriber
Login to website
Create & edit own posts
Publish & delete own posts
Upload images & media
Edit & delete any posts
Edit categories & tags
Moderate comments
Modify website settings
Install & manage themes
Manage widgets
Install themes & plugins
Update WP, themes & plugins
Add & manage users
WordPress roles and their capabilities

Administrators have full privileges and can change every aspect of the site. Nothing is off-limits, including deleting everything. We recommend limiting the number of Administrators on each site to a minimum.

Editors can view, edit, publish and delete all content on the site, including content published by others. Editors can also moderate comments, manage categories, tags and images. Editors are not able to change website settings.

Authors can edit, publish and delete their own content only.

Contributors can create and edit their own content, but cannot publish them. Only Administrators and Editors can publish content created by a Contributor. Once a contributor’s content is published, it may no longer be edited by the contributor.

Subscribers are mainly useful as a way for identifying website visitors on your site. For example, your site may only display members-only content. Website members would receive the Subscriber role.

Managing Users

You can edit or delete your website users from the Users → All Users screen.

Click on an existing user to update their details (name, email address, description, etc).

On the same screen, you can select multiple users and then delete them (Bulk Actions) or change their roles.

If you delete users, remember to assign their content to another user to avoid losing content on your site.

Assign content to another user to prevent content from being deleted too

Next Steps

Here are some common tasks related to users and authors.

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