Whether you’re a simple WordPress website owner or creating a site for your clients, chances are that you would like to restrict user from accessing certain resources of your site. This is, in fact, an important factor that you should consider for making your WordPress site/blog protected against hacker attacks.
Thankfully, WordPress provides several great plugins that help in managing the roles, as well as, capabilities of WordPress users, such as:
1. User Role Editor
With over 2,00,000 downloads, User Role Editor makes one of the most widely used WordPress plugins. Thanks to thus plugin, you can easily change the role and capabilities of users (except for administrator). Once you’ve installed this plugin, you just need to check the checkbox with defined capabilities to which you want to assign some role. After making the desired changes, simply click on the “update” button to save all those changes.
Key Features:
- Allows deleting unwanted self-made roles.
- Let you assign capabilities on per user basis. Gives
- the ability to assign multiple roles to users at the same time and so on.
2. Members
This role manager plugin has been downloaded by more than 1,00,000 users. The “Members” WordPress plugin helps in extending the control over a WordPress blog. It was designed primarily to make WordPress a powerful “role” and “capability” management system.
Key Features:
- It comes with a Role Manager option, allowing you to perform such as editing, creating and deleting user roles and their capabilities.
- Provide control over which users can access the content of WordPress posts.
- Offer shortcodes to give better control over the users having access to content and more.
3. Advanced Access Manager (aka AAM)
This is a must-have role manager plugin for WordPress users seeking for tools and/or ways to optimize security of their WordPress site. It helps in strengthening the security of a WP site, by defining access to posts, pages and sections of the backend. It comes loaded with several enhancement tools that helps in customizing the controls for a single blog or a multi-site network. It has been downloaded by more than 50,000 users.
Key Features:
- Limit the number of attempts users can make to log-in into your site.
- By default, lockout any selected IP addresses that seems to belong to a potential hacker.
- Let you control access on posts, pages and categories.
- Helps in configuring access to the media files.
- Allows tracking when a user is logged-in or logged-out and much more.
4. User Access Manager
If your website requires creating user groups, then the User Access Manager plugin can prove a worthy choice. It lets you create a user group, and helps in placing registered users to that group. In addition, it even help in setting up the rights of the new group. Whats’ more? This plugin helps in managing users access to WordPress posts, pages and files. This plugin has been downloaded by over 40,000 users.
Key Features:
- This is an ideal plugin for WordPress blog owners, as it allows them to create a member area or a private section.
- Helps in assigning separate access for both readers, as well as, editors.
- Allows setting access based on user groups and post categories.
- Help in hiding entire page/posts and a lot more.
5. Capability Manager Enhanced
This is another great plugin for WordPress bloggers, who want to have better control on WordPress role management feature. With this plugin, you can manage roles assigned to subscriber, editor and other users. The plugin not just helps in adding roles, but also let you view or make changes to the capabilities of the roles. Besides this, it even enables you to add new capabilities to already assigned user roles. Capability Manager Enhanced plugin has been downloaded by around 30,000 users.
Key Features:
- It helps in creating roles and managing their capabilities.
- It allows setting up capabilities based on roles such as: granted, not granted, or blocked.
- Allows creating a backup of the most recent changes made to roles and capabilities.
- It even let non-administrators manage roles or users containing the same or lower capabilities and so on.
6. My Rules – The Front-End Access Manager
With just 200+ downloads, this is a new WordPress role manager plugin that can be used by bloggers, as it helps in managing the user roles assigned to posts types in an efficient manner. Additionally, with this plugin, you can limit your visitor/users access to a specific post type, or attachment, etc. This plugin is easy to manage and comes with a unique set of features such as:
Key Features:
- Helps in managing access level for custom post types.
- Provides security for individual posts.
- Let you control access level for all roles.
Wrapping Up!
No matter whether you’re a WordPress site owner or a developer creating a WordPress site/blog for any client, you’ll most likely need to restrict their access to the website. Luckily, there are plugins out there that can help you achieve such objective with ease. In this post, we’ve discussed about some of the most popular and widely used WordPress role manager plugins that are worth checking out. We’ve discussed about the role manager plugins based upon their number of downloads.
