How to Limit Access to Your WordPress Dashboard

How many people would you hand your house keys to and let get into anything that they want? The same can be said about your WordPress account and its users. In this article, we explore some of the easiest ways to limit access for WP users using the admin, code, and plugins.

If you considered your WordPress site like an online home, you wouldn’t always want everyone going through all of your drawers.

The good news is, after reading this, you’ll know how to hand out digital permission accordingly to your users and keep certain areas inaccessible.

To kick things off…

Why Limit Usage?

You trust everyone that has access to your WordPress account, right? Well, sure. Maybe. However, it doesn’t mean they need to have TOTAL access to everything.

There are times you don’t want every user to access it all.

For example, if you’re running a multi-author blog and just want editors to have access to write and publish — and nothing else. That way they can’t change the themes or plugins while logged in.

Or, maybe you don’t want subscribers to access your dashboard at all.

Whatever the case may be, it’s nice to have control over who has access to what, and set your WordPress site up accordingly.

Let’s start by limiting dashboard access in the WordPress dashboard.

Limiting Dashboard Access With Different User Roles and Permissions

If you’re the site owner, you can assign user roles that control how much access to the dashboard they have.

WordPress roles come with different capabilities and actions that users are allowed to conduct, such as writing and editing posts, creating pages, moderating comments, and more.

An easy way to limit access is to set up a new user as a Subscriber. The Subscriber role is very limited and only allows the user to read content on the frontend of the site and manage their profiles.

This can all be done in the admin area of WordPress.

To do this, simply go to Settings and then General. From there, just set any New User Default Role as a Subscriber.

You can change the roles of any user that has access to your site at any time. So, any existing user roles can be modified under Users and then All Users.

From there, click the box of the user whose role you’d like to change or you can select numerous users in bulk.

So what’s the difference of roles? The WordPress role options are:

• Admin/Super Admin: Allows access to the site network administration features and every other feature in a single site. Super Admin is only available with multisite.
• Editor: A user who can publish and manage posts, including the posts of other users.
• Author: Users can publish and manage their posts.
• Contributor: Will allow a user to write and manage their posts, but not publish them.
• Subscriber: As I mentioned, it’s very limited. It only allows the user to manage their profile.

As you can see, each role has different capabilities. You can adjust and change roles as needed.

Using Code to Limit Access

Another way of limiting access is with code. It’s easy to paste the following snippet of code into your child themes functions.php file.

This will block non-administrators from accessing your WordPress site’s backend. Only admins can have access and all other users will be redirected to the home page.

This code only functions when a user logs into the WordPress dashboard. It won’t apply to any user that’s not non-logged, because they wouldn’t have any dashboard access, to begin with.

If code isn’t your thing, there’s always a way to…

Prevent Users From Access with a Plugin

Plugins can have some advantages over the other options of limiting users. Plus, let’s face it, they’re easy to use.

For example, you can simply restrict access to user roles or users that have specific permissions and redirect others to a specific page. This makes it so that only trusted users can have dashboard access.

Here’s a quick rundown of several plugins (some with familiar faces) that can help limit access to your WordPress dashboard.

All of these are free to use, rated well, and have specific functionality.

Remove Dashboard Access

Once you have her installed and activated, all an be done in the Admin Menu and by clicking Activate.

In the Custom Admin menu area, you can fully customize the admin sidebar for selected user roles or specific users.

There’s a Customize button that when hit, will display all of your options. You can decide from the dropdown if you want to customize the menu for user roles or specific users.

You can also now drag and drop the top-level menu items if you’d like to re-order them.

When you hover your cursor over any menu item it will reveal Duplicate and Hide options for that item. You can also Select All or use the checkbox in any menu item to reveal the same to perform this in bulk.

Here, it shows a list of various security features that can be enabled and disabled at any time. One of the features is to Disable the file editor. Simply click the switch over if it’s in the Issues area.

If it’s not, it will be highlighted green and in the Resolved section. Once doing that, it will let you know that it switched over okay.