15 Incredibly Useful WordPress Plugins For Effective User Management and Login Process
If you’re setting up a magazine site, a membership site, or any other WordPress site that requires you to manage a community of users, you’ll need to give your users the ability to login into your website and access (or edit) the information provided inside their account they’ve created on your site.
After all, handling everything from user registration, to managing users’ profile pages, to their login credentials and so on, can be challenging (especially when you’re running a heavy traffic site).
However, you cannot possibly assign your users the ability to make all kinds of changes and edits within the admin panel. This is because giving control of your site to an amateur may result in breaking your website. Fortunately, WordPress uses the concept of “Roles” that give the website owner (ideally the site administrator) the ability to decide the actions a user can and cannot perform when using your site.
Each role comes with a set of restrictions and capabilities. However, you can have even better control over WordPress user management and login process by utilizing WordPress plugins. There are many useful plugins that can help you alter and make changes to the capabilities assigned to different roles in a site.
01. User Role Editor
If you’ve been looking for an easier way to make changes to the role and capabilities of your WordPress website users, then User Role Editor is the right plugin for you.
This plugin, basically, gives the flexibility to change the capabilities for user roles in just a few clicks. All you have to do is to “turn on” those checkboxes containing capabilities that you would like to add to a specific role. Next, click on the “Update” button to save all the changes you’ve made.
02. User Access Manager
Often when running a WordPress site/blog, you might require adding a specific section or block that can only be accessed by some particular users of a group. That is exactly what the User Access Manager is capable of doing.
This plugin will let you create a user group, and help add registered users to that group and set up a certain rights. This will ensure that your website post/page can be accessed by the specified group. Additionally, only that group of users will be able to write at your blog. The best part is that the plugin even allows setting separate access for your readers and editors.
03. User Switching
While developing or testing a WordPress theme, you might need to switch from one user account to another instantly. This is where the user switching plugin comes in handy.
This plugin lets you swap between many different user accounts quickly with just a simple click of a button named as “Switch To”. You can instantly log out of the account you’re using currently, and can immediately log into the other account.
04. Profile Builder
Well, as the name implies, this is a highly useful plugin for site owners that want to the ability to modify their user profile page. Additionally, you can even choose to alter the user registration and login page on the front-end.
The Profile Builder plugin enables to customize the site for your users, using the front-end menu for all your users. The best aspect about this plugin is that even allows users to make a few minor tweaks, such as customize basic user fields or embed their own custom user fields to the forms on the front-end. What’s more? The plugin even provides a few shortcodes to help users recover their lost password, edit profile, add login and log out functionality to the front-end and so on.
05. WP-CRM
This is the best plugin for site owners who want to improve user management. It helps extend the existing “CRM-like” features available in WordPress, so as to equip WordPress site owners with the wherewithal to manage their relationships with users. The plugin enables to organize users registration with custom-attributes such as the ability to find specific users using filters and more.
Furthermore, the WP-CRM plugin provides a control panel that helps in managing all your customers, affiliates, partners, etc. This plugin comes loaded with several great features like a group notification add-on, notifications management, track user activities and much more.
06. Customize Admin
If you want the capability to customize the look and feel of your WordPress login and dashboard pages, then Customize Admin plugin will best suit your needs. It allows to upload your own custom image for the login screen, and also enable to add a custom link to the logo on the login page.
Additionally, the Customize Admin plugin also enables to disable some of the chosen dashboard widgets, and allows to get rid of the meta generator tag from the head section available in your website html code.
07. WangGuard
Considering the increasing attacks on a WordPress site, it is essential that you’re using a plugin that can help keep your site protected against spam user registration. You can achieve such an objective using the WangGuard plugin.
The plugin helps in protecting a WordPress website registration page from malicious (or unwanted) users. In fact, it keeps your installation clean from spam users and sploggers (referred to as the plagiarists present on the web). This plugin basically helps incorporate an antivirus to keep the user registration of the WordPress installations more secure.
08. New User Approve
A standard registration process requires adding the registered user details inside the database, which is followed by sending an email to the user containing their login details. But, what if the email is being accessed by an unwanted user? You can avoid such a situation from happening, by adding an additional step to the registration process, using the New User Approve plugin.
When this plugin gets activated, once a user registers in your site, an email will be sent to your website administrator instead of the user. And, your site admin will decide to approve or deny the registration request. And then, an email will be sent to the user telling if the user has been approved or denied as a registered user. In the case, the user gets approved, the email will contain all the login details. But, till the time a user is not approved he/she will not be able to login into the site.
09. WP-Members
If you’re running a membership site, then you would probably want to restrict the access of your website content to only the members of your site (i.e. registered users). However, WordPress allows the content to be viewable by all the user by default. But, using WP-Members WordPress plugin, you can ensure that your content can only be accessed by the registered users.
The WP-members plugin by default restricts access to all of the posts. However, you can choose to limit access only to some specific content as well. The plugin provides registration/login inline within the content instead of the WP login page.
10. Delete Me
At times, a user might want to delete his account from your website. You can make this process easier for your users, by providing them the ability to delete their role from the front-end only, using the Delete Me plugin. This plugin lets users having specific WordPress roles (except for administrators) to delete themselves.
The plugin helps delete all of the posts, comments and links of the users once their account is completely deleted.
11. Multisite User Management
Are you running multiple sites on a WordPress network? Well, then manually adding each user to your website can be challenging. Fortunately, the Multisite User Management plugin makes the task of managing users in multiple sites a hassle-free task.
Once this plugin is activated, it will automatically add users to the sites on your WordPress network. In addition, users are being assigned a default role for each website on your network. You can even choose to keep your site private, by not assigning a role.
12. User Registration Aide
You may wish to add many new additional fields on your website user registration form, which is a good practice to prevent spammers from attacking your site. This objective can be achieved by using the WordPress user registration aide plugin. It helps add several new fields on the registration form when a user registers on your site. All the new fields help in providing detailed information about the registered users, which eventually help in managing the users in a better way.
The new fields that you add to a new user registration form can also be added to the existing forms as well. Some of the new fields that are added to the form are AIM screen name, nickname, first name, last name, and many more fields. The plugin even will also enable you to add custom fields.
13. BU Section Editing
If you run a content-heavy WordPress site and would like to give your website editors with advanced permissions to manage the content, then BU Section Editing plugin perfectly suit your needs. It helps manage all the editors on your site, by offering advanced editing privileges to group users.
In a nutshell, the plugin help in creating “section editing groups” and render the control to users, enabling them to edit some specific content. It also helps in assigning new “Section Editor Role” to a user group to let them know what content (such as pages, posts and custom post types) the group can edit. This is an ideal plugin for site owners who want advanced privileges over their content editing workflow.
14. Scan-to-Login™
This is another great plugin for security that will help avoid any unwanted user to login into your WordPress site. To ensure security of a WordPress website it provides users with a fun and easy way to login into the site, by scanning the QR code using their mobile device.
So, if you want to make your login or registration process seamless, then the Scan-to-Login will definitely prove the best bet for you.
15. OneID Sign In
This is another plugin that helps make user registration a smooth process. The plugin lets users log in simply with a click or tab, and get rid of the need of entering username and password. So, you no longer have to worry about lost or forgotten password, and thereby saves a lot of your time (and money).
The plugin easily maps to a new or an existing user’s account on your WordPress site. With this plugin, you can even decide if you would like to have a sign-in button or not, and accordingly can make changes to your theme CSS.
Conclusion
If, you own a WordPress powered site or a blog, and want better control over user management and login process, then the above mentioned plugins will definitely help you achieve your objective in the most efficient and effective manner possible.
Excellent advice. Here you have listed some of the best WordPress plugins which are very useful to improve blog performance.
Great. Really helpful article for me. I added also a Facebook reg/login posibility to the WP site + this plugins you have mentioned, and got greatly working classifieds site with user’s content.