Understanding roles and properly assigning them to users is essential in the process of segregation of duties. By default, WordPress has a set of six pre-defined roles: Super Admin, Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber.

Further, each of these roles can perform a set of tasks called ‘Capabilities’. Now, the capabilities include the power to “publish_posts“, “moderate_comments“, and “edit_users“, etc.

Assigning pre-defined roles to users

Now, only the admin can assign roles. If you have powers of the admin then, assign roles to users as:

Step 1 – Log in to your dashboard

Step 2 – Go to users section

Step 3 – Assign proper roles to users

Assigning custom roles by the use of a plugin

For defining custom roles for each user, you can do this by following these steps:

Step 1 – Install a plugin ‘User role editor”

Step 2 – Go to ‘Users’>Other roles

Step 3 – Define/add custom roles for a particular user.

You can better control and monitor who does what on your website with these roles. This is a simple but great measure to secure your website.