Why Add or Remove User Role Capabilities in WordPress

WordPress comes with a built-in user management system and some predefined user roles and permissions.

As an Administrator, you have the ability to perform any action on your WordPress website. For instance, you can add or remove new users, install plugins and themes, delete content, and more.

If you run a multi-author WordPress blog, then you can add other users with Editor, Author, or Contributor user roles. This gives them user role permissions to add new content, but they cannot do administrative tasks.

WordPress also comes with a Subscriber role so users can log in to your site and manage their profiles.

Similarly, WordPress plugins can also create user roles with custom permissions. For example, eCommerce plugins can create a user role for customers with specific custom permissions, or a membership plugin can create its own custom user roles for members.

But what if you wanted to give a user role certain extra permissions or take away some existing permissions?

For instance, you may want to take away publishing permission from the Author user role, or allow Authors to edit other user’s blog posts.

What if you wanted to create a totally custom user role with limited capabilities?

That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily modify user role capabilities in WordPress and create custom user roles with specific permissions.

Add / Remove User Role Capabilities in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the Members plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the Members » Roles page and click on the Edit link below the user role that you want to modify.