Which WordPress Role Is Right For The Situation?

I’m pleased to welcome Paul Taubman as a guest blogger today!

As an awesome Solopreneur, you do a lot in your business. In fact, you might even be the one to do EVERYTHING in your business. At some point, you will probably hire an employee or a virtual assistant. You might work with other people to help develop your website’s content. The point I am trying to make here is that you cannot do everything yourself if you want to expand your business.

If you are using WordPress as your website platform, did you know that you can add users to do different things on it? I am going to wage a bet that you are an Administrator on your website and can do whatever you want! You can change themes, add or delete plugins, create new users, and do just about whatever you want! You are the one who will be adding, deleting, modifying, installing, and keeping your website humming along. As the Admin, you will have the necessary authorization to do all this.

When you hire a new person to develop content for your site, you can add them as a user. However, it may not be necessary for that new person to be an Administrator and have complete access to everything on your site!

WordPress has about 5 different levels of authority automatically build into it. If you are running WordPress, you already have these and should know about them.

There are 5 Roles that you can assign to any given user in WordPress:

• Subscriber
• Contributor
• Editor
• Author
• Administrator

Let’s start at the lowest level of user and work our way up to the most ‘powerful.’ Any function that a you are permitted to perform is called a ‘capability’ – the more capabilities you have, the more powerful your role.

Subscribers

If someone has an account on your website at the bare minimum, they are a subscriber. At this level, the only thing they can do is read your content that is on your site! They can manage their profile if they wanted to. This is not much different than someone who simply comes to your site and reads the content (much as you are doing right now!). If you have a blog where people just come to your site, there is no need to make someone a subscriber. Just as you are reading this here, you do not need to have a user account to the WordPress site. This role may be important if you are running a membership site – that will be left up for a topic on another article!

Contributors

Moving up the power chain, we have Contributors. As a Contributor, you can write and manage your own posts, but you do not have the authority to publish them. This is good User Role if you want to have someone writing posts, but they need to be reviewed and published by someone higher up. If you have a regular guest blogger who provides you with content, s/he can be a contributor on your site and create the post directly within your site. To retain full editorial authority, you (as the Admin) would have to approve/publish the contributor’s work.

Authors

An Author is somebody who can publish and modify any posts that they create. The Author is similar ro the Contributor whereas they can both publish his/her own posts. The author, however, cannot change or edit anyone else’s work; they can only change their own.

Editor

On the other hand, the Editor role is someone that can publish and manage posts and pages as well as manage other users’ posts, etc. Just like the Editor at a newspaper or magazine, this person can take charge and do anything they want to the content of the paper. An Editor in WordPress can do whatever he or she wants to with the other content on the site. As you can see, the Editor has more authority compared to the Author since the Editor can change and delete someone else’s work. Editors can also manage categories and moderate comments.

Administrators

So far, all these roles are strictly content based. None of the roles explained can change the WordPress site. Once you become an user that has the Administrator role, you can now affect the entire WordPress website.As an Administrator you would have access to all the administration features of the site. Changes are if you are the only person on the site, you do it all – change themes, add plugins, create users, moderate comments, This is the most powerful level in WordPress.

As you bring people on board to help you with your website, keep these roles in mind! There is no need to give everyone Administrative access. Use the Administrator Role sparingly!

About Paul

Paul B. Taubman, II is an expert trainer. Traveling across the county, Paul trained countless folks how to work on intricate computer systems. He was a Master Trainer teaching Instructors across the country how to teach courses. As a highly respected College Adjunct, Paul teaches technical Computer Programming courses. With all this training experience, Paul has learned how to teach all this ‘technical stuff’ to non-techies! He is a master at taking the obscure and complex and explaining it in a simple, fun, and educational way. Paul teaches entrepreneurs how to make money with their website. Your stress levels will melt away after working with Paul as you take control of your website and turn it into a profit machine. Come learn from Paul!