5 Best WordPress User Roles Management Plugins

By default, the WordPress Platform provides you with a User Roles and Capabilities Management System. It controls what users can do on your WordPress website. However, it does not allow you to change user roles and capabilities.

This can prove quite restrictive for you as you cannot alter particular user roles and their capabilities. It can be frustrating for you if you are managing a large website with multiple authors, contributors, editors, and other types of users.

So, what’s the way out?

Well, you can manage user roles and capabilities by using a powerful WordPress User Roles Plugin. In this article, I will showcase you 5 Best WordPress User Roles and Capabilities Management Plugins, which will assist you to customize user roles and capabilities easily on your WordPress Website.

As a matter of fact, by default the WordPress Platform provides five user roles. These are:

Administrator

The WordPress User Role Management System provides different user roles. Among these User Roles, the Administrator User Role is the most powerful. Users who get access to administrator role can perform different administrative functions. They can add new posts, edit any posts, and can even delete posts. They can also install, edit, and delete plugins and themes.

Apart from performing these usual functions, an administrator has the authority to add new users to the WordPress site as well as delete any existing user. An administrator user can also change information about existing users such as changing the user password.

Usually, administrator role is taken up by site owners as it gives complete control over their WordPress site. However, if you are planning to run a multi-user WordPress site, then you be very careful in allocating the administrator user role as it involves the entire management of your WordPress site.

Editor

The Editor User role in WordPress is responsible for handling the content sections of your website. An Editor can add, publish, edit, and publish any post on a WordPress website. Apart from this, an editor can also edit, delete and moderate comments. However, they do not have access to add new users. They cannot install plugins and themes, and cannot change site settings as well.

Author

An Author User Role is attributed with the responsibility of writing, editing, and publishing their posts. They are also allowed to delete their posts even if they are published. They can add tags to their posts. However, they cannot create categories. They can only choose from existing categories.

They are only allowed to view comments. They cannot moderate, approve, edit or delete any comments. They also cannot install plugins or themes, and cannot make any changes to site settings. So, when compared to administrator or editor user role, an author user role is a fairly low-risk user role.

Contributor

A Contributor User Role is given the rights to add new posts and delete their posts. However, they cannot publish any posts including the posts that they have added. They also cannot create new categories, nor they can upload files. They do not have access to plugins or themes. They cannot do any changes to settings on your site. They can view comments but cannot approve or delete comments.

Subscriber

They can login to your WordPress site and can change their user profile. They can change their password too but cannot do anything else inside your WordPress Admin Area. This user role is set up when you require users to login for reading your posts or for posting a comment.

However, with respect to these user roles, the default version of WordPress does not allow you to make any changes to user roles and capabilities. Moreover, you cannot even create your custom groups. This is where the need of WordPress User Roles Plugins is greatly felt.

Using WordPress User Roles Plugins, you can easily overcome the restrictive nature of default WordPress User Roles and Capabilities Management System. For example, let’s take the case of Contributor User Role. The default WordPress User Roles Management System does not allow Contributors to upload files.

So, if they require uploading images to their articles, they cannot do so. However, by using WordPress User Role Plugin, you can give permission to Contributor User Role so that they can upload images (files) to their articles.

That’s precisely the reason why WordPress User Roles Plugins have become so popular with webmasters and bloggers around the world.

In this article, you will get to see some of the most popular and best WordPress User Roles Plugins, using which you can easily customize user roles and capabilities.

So, now let us explore these WordPress User Roles Management Plugins.

5 Free WordPress User Roles Management Plugins

1. Members

Members is an immensely popular and one of the best WordPress User Role Plugin. It has extensive features which enable you to control the users actions exactly the way you want.

Upon installing and activating, the Members plugin creates two new sub-menus under the ‘Users’ Menu in your WordPress Site Dashboard. These sub-menu items are Roles and Add New Role.

Roles list out all the available roles, plus the number of users and capabilities. When you take your mouse over a role, it will show up additional links such as Edit, Delete, and View Users. If you want to customize a role or want to add new capabilities to a role, you can do it by choosing the Edit option. Lastly, click on the ‘Update Role’ Button.

Likewise, if you want to Add New Role, you need to access Users > Add New Role. Here, you need to provide role name and role label. Then you need to select the capabilities that you want to give to this role. Finally, you have to click on the ‘Add Role’ Button. The plugin also provides some very useful shortcodes by which you can control user capabilities.

2. User Role Editor

User Role Editor is one of those powerful WordPress Plugins, which lets you to easily manage user roles and capabilities. Using User Role Editor, you can add new roles, change user capabilities and can provide selected capabilities to your users. Once it is installed and activated, User Role Editor WordPress User Role Plugin adds ‘Capabilities’ link to a user profile through which you can change user capabilities.

It also provides ‘Primary Role’ and ‘Other Roles’ sections through which you can change users’ default roles and can also assign additional roles, respectively. Additional capabilities can be added just by clicking on the relevant capability boxes. There is also a button for selecting or unselecting all capabilities. Once you have made the changes, you need to click on the ‘Update’ button.

3. WPFront User Role Editor

With WPFront User Role Editor you can easily manage WordPress user roles. It allows you to create, edit, delete and manage user roles and capabilities.

Some of its outstanding features include:

• It can create new roles.
• Edit existing roles.
• Rename existing roles.
• Existing roles can be cloned.
• Add or Remove User Capabilities.
• Default User Role can be changed.
• Restore Role.
• Multiple Roles can be assigned.
• Login redirect basic.
• Widget permissions basic.
• And More…

4. Advanced Access Manager

Advanced Access Manager is a simple yet very powerful WordPress User Roles Plugin. The Plugin provides ultimate control over your WordPress Site and helps you in managing access to your posts, menus, dashboard, widgets of your WordPress powered website.

Once the plugin is activated, it lists a new menu item as ‘AAM’ in the dashboard of your website. Clicking on this menu item will take you to a new page where you will find ‘Control Manager.’ You can customize the user roles from here. For each role, you are provided with three options – Manage, Edit, and Delete. You can even add a new role. It provides you the ability to select any existing role for copying capabilities.

Advanced Access Manager allows you to manage and customize access for a role for a specific user or visitors. For managing access for role, the plugin provides the ‘Roles’, ‘Users’ and ‘Visitor’ Tabs. It also provides the ‘Role Editor’ section for managing user roles.

5. Webmaster User Role

Webmaster User Role is an easy to use and very flexible WordPress User Roles Plugin. It creates a new role as ‘Admin’ which is similar to Administrator with the following changes:

• It hides / removes Settings Menu
• It hides / removes Plugins Menu
• It hides / removes Tools Menu
• It hides / removes Users Menu
• It hides / removes Appearance > Editor
• It disables Theme Installation
• It disables Theme Switching
• It hides non-essential Dashboard Items
• Disable WP Core Updates

These are the top and the best WordPress User Roles Plugins which enable you to manage user roles and capabilities easily. I sincerely hope that you will find this presentation on, 5 Best WordPress User Roles and Capabilities Management Plugins immensely useful for managing and controlling users access to your WordPress Site.