As your blog or website grows, the work involved in maintaining or filling it up with content can get tedious. It might even be too much for just one person depending on how much you scaled up. You’ll need more hands. Thankfully, there are ways of dealing with such a logistical problem without growing an extra set of arms or having a clone; it’s called WordPress roles.
WordPress roles allow different levels of user privileges for the site. That could depend on their job hierarchy or urgency. Oftentimes, they also vary in functions depending on the skill set of the user. This can range from SEO, programming, content creation, site management, and more. Hence, each role has its own distinct “personality” (what have you) which is also tied to their function.
Below are those WordPress roles we’re talking about. Each with their own explanation and part for the success of your website. We’ll be presenting them to you in descending order.
SUPER ADMIN
First off in this list is the supreme being of the multiverse… or not. However, think of the Super Admin as just that when it comes to WordPress. This one of the most powerful and capable WordPress roles since the Super Admin can add or delete sites. As such, they are responsible for maintaining websites or a network of websites and enact high-level changes in all of them.
If you’re finding this role quite unfamiliar in your tenure, that’s because the Super Admin only exists in WordPress Multisites. Those are a type of WordPress installations that allow the Super Admin to run, access, and maintain several websites at once. The difference from manually doing that is that you are given a single dashboard or control panel for all those sites.
So, if one of those websites go down or some changes are needed for a network of websites, it’s the Super Admin’s task. A Super Admin can also override or deny some of the regular Administrator’s capabilities.
ADMINISTRATOR
If you’re not running a Multisite installation for WordPress, then you most likely manage websites one-at-a-time. For that matter, you’ll be confined to the less powerful but still one of the most authoritative WordPress user roles, the Administrator. Compared to the Super Admin, the regular Administrator’s domain is only for one website.
As you might have guessed already, the Administrator is the most flexible among the remaining WordPress roles. They can add content, edit them, delete them as well as install plugins and themes on the WordPress site. It is also through them that new users can be added to the site, basically assigning roles to them as well. In that regard, they also have the capacity to delete any existing user on their level or below them.
You can imagine that this WordPress user roles is usually reserved for the site owner. It gives them full control over everything in the site and allows them to change everything on a particular WordPress domain.
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EDITOR
The Editors are basically the enforcers of user roles WordPress. They manage the posts or the content and are allowed to edit, delete, or even add them themselves. In addition, they can also moderate and delete the comments of the viewers or website subscribers, assuming this was part of their job.
The main difference between an administrator and an editor is the lack of fundamental site controls for the latter. Editors are only given access to make changes to the content. They typically lack the privileges to change the website designs and assign roles to existing WordPress users much less delete them. This is evident in their limited Dashboard controls. They can, however, manage categories and links.
Nevertheless, the Editor WordPress roles are reserved for senior roles in a blog or website business since filtering out content is still an essential task especially if your site deals in news and accurate information.
AUTHOR
At this point, the privileges just keep dropping. An author is simply responsible for the content of the website. They can write and add posts, edit them, and even delete them. They (usually) cannot, however, delete comments or manage categories in the WordPress site. Hence, they have far fewer privileges than the Editor and being an Author isn’t really comparable to being an Administrator.
While Authors cannot create categories, they can add tags, both of which are essential for SEO. As mentioned before, there’s nothing Authors can do to with the subscriber comments but watch them. They cannot moderate, approve, nor delete comments– that’s often an Editor’s task. At best, most of what Authors can do to help with the site management is to edit or delete their posts.
Of course, that’s probably already a given based on the name of the WordPress role. The consequences for the Author’s actions lie only in the content they write or the posts they tamper with.
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CONTRIBUTOR
If the Author role is a stripped-down Editor role, then the Contributor is a stripped-down Author. They have even fewer capabilities than Authors. In fact, their default tasks are only limited to three: reading posts, deleting posts, and editing posts. Since they are not mainstays of the WordPress websites, they are not granted the same rights as the Authors.
Additionally, Contributors cannot publish their own posts or add media images to them. Their role lacks the capacity to upload their own files to the WordPress site which severely limits the work they can do. However, it’s all for the best since contributors don’t need to spend that much time in the site anyway.
SUBSCRIBER
The subscriber has no job or task involved with WordPress sites but their role is important either way. Their WordPress role type is highly limited and even has fewer privileges than the Contributor. The Dashboard they’re presented with is quite desolate. One of the two functions they are allowed on the website is to read all the posts.
The other one is to manage their own profiles. It’s not too different from a regular viewer who just happened upon your site. The use of the Subscriber role, however, is for subscription-based websites or if your comment section requires users to log in for better verification.
Despite these WordPress roles having different functions, they are all essential to your blog or website one way or another depending on your needs. So, make sure not to ignore them!
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