What are WordPress User Roles and Membership Levels

The concept of a ‘role’ is central to WordPress user management. And thus, there are special WordPress user roles. As a site owner, you can easily define login access and capabilities for other website users. For instance, whether they can add posts, manage plugins, moderate comments, etc. Every default WordPress user role has its default permissions for smooth website management. The best part, you can either grant them as they are to other people or even implement custom user role WordPress using specialized Plugins. This helps you to modify default roles and create the access workflow you need.

In WordPress, user roles and membership levels are different and yet interrelated for advanced management. It helps you to manage access to content and varied site features. To put it simply, you can manage your team efficiently by providing them different roles. 

Want to get into details about WordPress user roles and how to easily manage them for your membership? This post will provide answers to it all, in a simple way. 

What are WordPress User Roles?

Okay, to understand WordPress roles perfectly, let’s take an example of a class. For instance, in a class of 60 students, there are simply 4 houses. Blue, Green, Red, and Yellow. Now, there’s one Class Teacher, Class Prefect, and a Separate House Captain for each house for perfect management. Further, there’s also an attendance manager. Think about what their roles would be and how they would divide tasks efficiently among them?

• A Class Teacher will have complete authority and say in what happens in the class to keep the management ultra smooth. 
• A Class Prefect will be responsible for all the major activities and workings of the class to keep the environment lively. 
• The separate house captains will look out for their particular house activities and boost their morale. 
• Finally, the attendance manager will focus exquisitely on a specific task. To report regular attendance and keep a track of absentees to keep up the class rapport. 

Just like that, your WordPress site is a class. For an efficient and smooth management,  you would need to assign WordPress permissions and WordPress capabilities accordingly. Let us now understand WordPress multiple roles and how they support your website management. 

Default WordPress User Roles Explained – Overview

Before we move on, you should always have this list of WordPress user roles and permissions at hand to understand the built-in capabilities of WordPress roles and capabilities.

• Super Admin for WordPress, as the name suggests, has the highest level of access, including to the site network administration. This is a key role if you have one site or a network of websites.
• Administrator has full access to a single site, including important administration features such as managing content, users, settings, and functionality.
• Editor role in WordPress can publish and manage posts (of other people as well).
• Authors can publish and manage their own posts.
• Contributors get WordPress user permissions to write posts and save the draft for editors/authors to check and publish. 
• Subscriber WordPress roles can only manage their profile.

To dig deeper into WordPress user permissions and capabilities, let’s display them all in the table next to the role.

Tabular Comparison of WordPress Roles and Permissions

Since user access and permissions are important to membership sites – they determine who can see what, do what, and access what within your WordPress membership site. Thus, it is exciting and important to understand WordPress user roles and membership levels side by side. 

Custom WordPress Membership Levels & Admin Levels Controls

A membership site creates exclusive content for their members. Herein, having a tiered access is the topmost feature that is valued by members. While running a membership site with WordPress, you should explore how to protect your special content and manage admin access using the power of WordPress user roles.

As you know, membership sites often have tiered content access (free, premium, VIP) to offer members exclusive content based on their specific tier. This principle is also used by popular content monetization platforms with subscription levels like Patreon. Besides, it’s important to provide the right level of access to content creators and managers who run the membership site (backend access).

WordPress membership plugins like ARMember, MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro and others offer their own membership levels on top of WordPress user roles. Those can help you create private pages and define what content and features can be accessed by:

• Members
• Site admins and managers (e.g. course creators or blog admins)

Let’s take a closer look at how you can employ and control WordPress user roles using ARMember and make the best of your site and subscriptions!

Managing Membership Levels

As for members and their access to your content, membership levels usually restrict frontend access (pages, posts, downloads, videos, forums, etc.) – and you can control that via the subscription levels that you create with ARMember.

For example, imagine you want a scenario like…

• Free Membership – can access basic blog posts.
• Silver Membership – can access all pages, posts and carts.
• Gold Membership – can access premium content, videos, and downloads.

Basically, you firstly create these subscription levels within ARMember – and then you decide how your content should be added to WordPress, and then restrict access to those pages based on the membership/subscription level.

You can do that with ARMember’s Content Access Rules and define varied permissions and capabilities based on membership tiers. 

Here’s where you’ll find all your plans and be able to tweak who can see what on your site. You just tick the boxes and it works!

Managing Membership Access & Admin Levels in the Membership Area

As for the membership site management, it’s really easy to help site administrators manage memberships, payments, content access, and integrations.

The roles in ARMember use default and extend WordPress’s default user roles and give detailed control over membership-specific tasks, for example, to manage members, payments, content, and more.

The most important thing is that you can tailor what different user roles can or cannot do within the ARMember plugin. ARMember allows you to assign custom capabilities like arm_manage_members or arm_manage_transactions to any WordPress user role.

For example, it’s easy to assign the custom capability arm_manage_members to an Editor role if you want certain editors to have the ability to manage members. Or, you might assign the arm_manage_transactions capability only to Administrators or a custom finance manager role.

Using an External WordPress Role Editor

WordPress is very flexible when it comes to customizing user roles and capabilities in the context of specific plugins – but you also need to get extra user role editor plugins for this! For example, you may download free plugins like User Role Editor or Advanced Access Manager. These plugins let you easily assign ARMember custom capabilities to specific roles without manually editing user role files.

There are multiple ways you can use the custom capabilities and assign them to WordPress user roles. Since the Administrator WordPress user role has all capabilities, including both default WordPress ones and the custom ARMember ones, this role can manage the plugin’s settings, members, content access rules, payments, and more.

For the Editor WordPress user role, you may want to manage content access rules, email notifications, and badges/achievements, but usually won’t have full administrative control like an Administrator.

You definitely now have an idea of what is a user role editor and what are member levels. But both provide various permissions and capabilities. So, how are they different? Let us explore that now. 

How are WordPress User Roles and WordPress Membership Levels Different

It is super exciting to observe how both of these concepts work together for a smooth WordPress site management. 

• WordPress User Roles control the backend access of WordPress site while membership levels control the content access efficiently. 
• User roles are like admin, editor, subscriber etc. whereas the levels exquisitely define membership access to pages, posts, downloads, courses, etc. 
• With WordPress roles, you define whether a user can edit a post, edit settings, download plugins and themes etc. Therefore, the capabilities that can alter your WordPress site. On the other hand, membership level access can be defined based on what you want to offer at each level. It can be access to full content, access to premium posts and pages, or community access. 

A WordPress user can have both. AUser Role as well as a membership level. They are separate systems, however, can be used hand in hand for a superior membership site management. It ensures smooth workflow and accurate content access thus, motivating your members to stay on your site. 

Final Word: Using WordPress User Roles for Your Membership Plugin

WordPress user roles are a great system for managing multi-user sites, especially those that monetize user content, like membership plugins for WordPress. Some membership plugins assign WordPress user roles to members automatically. For example, a “Gold Member” could also be assigned the “Subscriber” or custom “Gold Member”. Plugins like ARMember allow you to use both systems together, default and custom roles, and extend the role editing capabilities with the dedicated plugins.

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