Who Has Access To Your WordPress Site?

Who Has Access To Your WordPress Site?

by Tiffany Johnson

Here’s a quick exercise. Log on to your WordPress Dashboard and click on Users. How many users do you have? How many different access levels are you using for those users?

If yours looks anything like mine did, you have either 1 user with full reign of the site or 2 or more users who also have full reign of the site.

After reading the article, Set Safe, Secure User Roles on Your WordPress Blog on Problogger.net, I modified some things on my own WordPress websites in regards to user roles and access levels. I’d been using administrator level for everything and created additional users at that same level for my team.

In the article, Karol K. refers to single user blogs and blogs with multiple contributors, however I thought it would be most helpful to translate that in terms of you, your virtual assistant, and your website manager.

There are three access levels that are important to you when it comes to your WordPress website and your virtual team.

So how do you decide which levels will work best for your virtual team. Here’s a suggested breakdown:

Keep yourself as the administrator, but also, as Karol K. recommended in the article, create a second account for yourself at the Editor level. This way you are mainly logging in as the Editor. It’s not everyday that you’ll need to make major changes to your sites like updates or modifications to your sidebars.

Your website manager will need administrative access to your website in order to do everything an editor cannot do, such as updating plugins, WordPress, your theme, adding plugins, and modifying the look of your site, or change any of the code.

It’s a good idea to make your virtual assistant an editor or a contributor. If you want to review and publish pages and posts yourself, make your virtual assistant a contributor.

Regardless of which level you choose for your virtual assistant, make sure their nickname is listed as YOUR name. Why?

The author shows based on the nickname of the person who initially setup the page or blog posts.

Do you want your content showing as being authored by you or your virtual assistant?

If you need to make a correction, there’s an easy fix.

Here’s how to change the nickname of the user your virtual assistant uses:

From within the user profile you’ve setup for your virtual assistant, change the Nickname. Make sure it appears in the dropdown as well.

Okay, so back to the original questions:

Have your answers changed? How will you use this information?

If you’re all set and ready, please share this post with your friends. See below, ‘I made it SUPER easy!’