In this post, we’re going to talk about using a membership plugin on your WordPress site. How does a membership plugin become helpful?
As you may already know, WordPress comes with a registration feature (which allows people to join your site) and default user roles:
- Super Admin
- Administrator
- Editor
- Author
- Contributor
- Subscriber
When you create a site, and provide a username and password, you automatically become the administrator. And you can assign various user roles to other people whom you’ve granted access to your site.
We’re going to use a plugin called Members to manage user roles with more control.
Members and Web Hosting Services
If you want to retain consistent users on your site, you may consider offering memberships as a way to augment your general web hosting services.
WordPress makes it easy to add as many members as you want. And users can register themselves, which means you don’t mean to manually add people. New members can use the WordPress user registration page to sign up and then confirm their subscription via an email address they’ve provided. This ensures compliance with data privacy laws.
How to Get Started With Members
Follow the steps below for installing the Members plugin and accessing the settings to control user roles.
- Install the Members plugin
- Click Members under Settings (for general settings)
- Edit user roles under Users -> Roles
In addition to controlling user roles and assigning “capabilities” you can select a default role that will be assigned to new members.
More Benefits of User Management
Having proper roles and capabilities makes your WordPre site more secure. Adjusting user roles means you can grant or deny privileges appropriate to the user.
Note: the Members plugin also supports custom post types. This means you can grant or deny privileges for certain users if you want to restrict access to a certain post type.
To break it all down, carefully managing user roles in WordPress helps maintain the integrity and security of your overall web hosting services.
