As a WordPress professional, we see too many people having bad habits when it comes to their website’s management. For example, they will send their own admin account with their own password, to the people who will help them on the site. This is a bad idea, because you will not be able to see who made which edits on the site.

WordPress has some pretty good user management functionalities built-in, let’s take a look at a simple one: new user creation in WordPress.

Add a new user in WordPress

In the left sidebar, go to Users > Add New.

You will be taken to the Add New User page, where all you need to to is to fill the form.

As you can see, things are very straightforward, let’s take a quick look at the form:

• Username: The username that will be used for login (email address can also be used for login). Try to avoid usernames like admin or the name of the website for security reasons, as these are the first hackers will try.
• Email: The email of the user. It can be used for login and will also be used for all communication purpose from WordPress, such as comments, notifications, password recovery,… so it’s better to use a valid email address.
• First name: Not mandatory, use it if it’s used in your WordPress templates and the name should appear.
• Last name: Not mandatory, use it if it’s used in your WordPress templates and the name should appear.
• Website: The user’s website. Use if for group blogs or websites where you give a backlink to authors.
• Language: Choice of the default language for the user’s WordPress interface. The user will be able to change this.
• Password: A password generator to create a strong password for your user. Make sure to send the password to your user in a safe way if you use this functionality. You can also ask your user to reset his password afterwards.
• Send User Notification: This will send an automated message to the new user to notify him of his account creation. Uncheck if you want to communicate this yourself.
• Role: The role of the new user. Be careful with this, as giving too much power to a user could become a security issue. You can check the user capabilities on this page. If you need to fine tune the users’ capabilities, there are plenty of plugins that allow you to do it.