Avoid time-consuming blunders by managing the roles of your team

If you manage a blog with multiple team members, you could save yourself a bit of time – and any prematurely published posts by guest authors or contributors – by setting up the correct roles.

Here’s an overview of the available roles:

• Administrator – has access to all the administration features within a single site.
• Editor – can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users
• Author – can publish and manage their own posts
• Contributor – can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them
• Subscriber – can only manage their profile

For instance:

• If you have a guest author for your blog, the preferred role for them is likely a Contributor.
• If someone tweaks your writing before publication, but you don’t want to give them unlimited power, they’ll likely be best off with the Editor role.

And so on and so forth.

You can change the user roles in the WordPress settings. From the left-hand menu, go to Users > All Users. Select the users you want to change by placing a check mark in the box next to their name.

Above the list of names, click to open the box that says “Change role to…” Making a change here will update the role for all the users you’ve selected.

You can also change the roles individually per user by clicking through to their user settings page.