Who is Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber

Especially, if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, you might have seen that WordPress provides different options to users and define their role according to their contribution to the blog. If you are a newbie, you might have a mess with these terms about who is a Contributor, Author, Editor, Subscriber, and Administrator. All these look same but are not.

If you run a single author blog and is only who posts articles on the blog you may think that you don’t need to learn all about these things but you should. If you run a multi-author blog, you might have seen that all the users on the blog have some kind of role on the blog whether they are Contributor, Author, Editor, Subscriber or Administrator. The administrator is super-power among all and has all the right to do anything on the blog. He can remove and change the user’s role, delete any posts. He has the rights which usually other members don’t have.

So, let take a look who are they and what is their role on the blog or website:-

 Different types of users and their roles on the blog:-

#1 Subscriber

Subscriber is the one who has no right at all on the blog. He can only log in to the blog and read the posts. He can’t remove anything or can’t do any activity on the blog.

#2 Contributor

Contributor can

• Write/edit their own posts
• Delete their own unpublished posts.

#3 Author

The author has all the rights that a contributor has. Along with these, he can,

• Edit their own published posts
• Delete their own published posts
• Upload media files including pictures, videos, etc. to their own posts.
• Publish their own unpublished posts.

#4 Editor

The editor can do everything that an author can do. Along with these, he can,

• Manage Categories and tags. Can do any modification
• Can approve or disapprove comments
• Manage links on the blog
• Edit, Publish or delete other user’s posts
• Create, Edit and Publish Pages also
• Read all private posts and pages.

#5 Administrator

The administrator has all the rights of the blog and almost can do anything. If your blog is a single-user blog, you are the administrator. For a quick view, you can

• Edit Anything on the blog
• Create more administrator.
• Change the user’s role or delete them.
• Update WordPress to a newer version
• Install plugins and themes and update them
• Configure widgets and plugins
• Delete the entire Website.
• Perform other administrative tasks.

So, I recommend you to have only one administrator per blog. If you allow guest posting, allow their roles to contributor only. So that they can post articles only. Bad peoples usually try to register themselves as a user on your blog. So, before you get into trouble, please uncheck the option of “Anyone Can Register” in the General tab under Settings on the dashboard.

Thanks, friend.