Today I’m going to walk you through how to manage usernames and passwords WordPress. You should always change the default username and password assigned when you initially installed WordPress, and you should also change it periodically, just like your employer (hopefully!) requires you to do on your work device from time to time. Some website owners also have multiple contributors to the site, and have a need to create multiple user accounts.
If you’ve been following along and doing any experimenting you may have found this already. But even if you’ve not, by now this process should be pretty darn familiar! Adding a new user or changing an existing user is done from the WordPress control panel. Scroll along the menu on the left until you find the option for Users. This will open up a page that will show you all of the existing users for your website. If this is a fresh install, you’re account should be the only one listed there.
This page is pretty much identical to the page that shows all the pages on your site, and also to the page that shows all the blog articles on your sites. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, WordPress’ consistency makes it incredibly easy to use, especially for folks new to the world of websites and blogging.
To add a new user account click the Add New button along the top. If you want to change an existing account hover over the account you want to change and select the option to edit. Either way, you’ll end up on a page that allows you to enter in a username, an email address, the first and last name of the account holder, as well as a role. The role is important because it controls who can make what sort of changes on your website. An Admin of course has full control over everything, whereas a contributor can maybe write posts, but can’t modify the functionality of the site, like adding a plugin or changing widgets. Once you’ve finished editing the information or adding in information for a new user click save and you are done!
If you have any questions about this post or any of the others covered so far, please drop me a line in the comments!
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