How to Add and Delete Users in WordPress?

WordPress offers a complete user management system to manage the content on the backend and frontend of your site. In addition, plugins also can add custom user roles to make the system more comprehensive. In most cases, you can enable registration on your WordPress site to allow users login to your site. However, there are situations you have to add and delete users from admin panel manually. In this article, we will explain how to do that.

How to Add a User in WordPress?

First let us explain the need and process of manually adding users in your WordPress site.

Why You Should Add Users Manually?

Here are some of the reasons you may need to add users:

• Create another administrator user.
• You want to add an author or contributor to provide admin panel access to them for creating content.
• Invitation based registration needs you to add the users those accepted your invitation.
• You have to manage custom roles like SEO Manager or Shop Manager on your site created with plugins.

How to Add Users in WordPress Site?

Login to your WordPress admin panel with your administrator username and password. When you are in the admin panel, navigate to “Users > Add New” section.

WordPress will show you a form for entering user details. You can fill the required details in the form and add new user to your WordPress site.

New User Details for WordPress

You have to fill out the following details in order to add a new user:

• Username – this is a required field and you can’t change the username in WordPress once it is created.
• Email – enter the email id which you can use to login instead of the username. This is also a required filed and you can use this email to retrieve your password in case if you forget it. By default, you will receive all emails from the sender name “WordPress”. You can change this to custom sender by adding a function in your theme.
• First Name – enter your first name.
• Last Name – enter your last name.
• Website – type your website URL, if you have any.
• Password – WordPress will automatically create password for the user. Click on the “Show password” button to view and change the auto generated password.
• Send User Notification – enable this checkbox to send the password to the email provided.
• Role – select appropriate role for the user. By default, WordPress will assign subscriber role to new users and be careful not to assign administrator role to any other user.
• Add New User – click this button to create a new user.

The user will get an email notification and can login to your WordPress admin panel using the created username and password. When using custom user roles, in most cases user needs to login from the frontend of your site. For example, participant is a custom role used in bbPress forum plugin. Participant users can enter your site using the login page and start posting forum content. Note that WordPress does not allow changing username once created. Therefore, make sure to provide proper username when creating.

Deleting Users in WordPress

Similar to creating users, there are many reasons you may need to delete a username from your WordPress site. Here are some of the reasons for manually deleting users:

• Transfer content from one author to another author
• Ban users by deleting them from your site’s membership
• Sometimes, you have to delete the users for cleaning up or privacy reasons.

How to Delete User in WordPress?

WordPress allows you to delete users from your admin panel. Follow the below instructions to delete a username.

• Login to your WordPress admin panel.
• Go to “Users > All Users” section.
• Here you can view all registered users on your site.
• Hover the cursor over the username you want to delete and choose “Delete” link.

• Click on “Confirm Deletion” button to permanently delete the user from your site.

Transfer Content to New User

When you are in “Users > All Users” section, the last column will show the number of posts published by the user. When you try to delete a user who has published posts on your site, WordPress will prompt you to confirm what action should be taken with the available posts. You can either choose to delete all the content along with the username or assign the content to another user on your site.

If you are deleting the author, contributor or administrator, make sure to assign the content to another user so that it will be available on the frontend. In case if you are deleting a registered guest author on your site and do not want to keep his / her content, you can simply select “Delete all the content” option.

After choosing the option, click on “Confirm Deletion” button. You will see a success message like below after the deletion of user.

Caution When Deleting Users

• By default, there are no options in WordPress to download all user details. Therefore, we recommend you to take database backup before deleting users from your site.
• When you delete a user, WordPress will permanently delete the details from the database. There is no “Trash” section and you can’t undo this action. You have no way to retrieve the deleted user and content, other than restoring from your backup.
• Make sure to understand the impact when deleting custom user roles. For example, deleting a customer user will delete all orders from the customer.