WordPress has six built-in roles, and only one of them can destroy your site. Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber exist on every single-site install, with Super Admin appearing only on a Multisite network. The safe default for anyone you are adding is the lowest role that lets them do the job, and for most people who want to write for you, that is Contributor or Author rather than the Administrator role most site owners hand out by reflex.
Verified 26 August 2026 against WordPress.org's own Roles and Capabilities documentation. That page states it was last updated 20 September 2024, which is before WordPress 7.0 (20 May 2026) and 7.1 (19 August 2026). The role model it describes is WordPress's own; the screens you click to apply it have been through two major releases since, so labels and layout may differ from what an older screenshot shows.
What a role actually is
A role is a bundle of permissions, and the permissions are the real unit.
WordPress calls the individual permissions capabilities, and there are dozens of them with names like publish_posts, moderate_comments and edit_users. A role is simply a named set of those, so that you can hand someone a job description instead of ticking sixty boxes.
The documentation is explicit that roles are not a strict ladder. In WordPress's own words, "One particular role should not be considered to be senior to another role. Rather, consider that roles define the user's responsibilities within the site." In practice each built-in role does hold fewer capabilities than the one above it, but the useful way to choose is still to ask what job the person has.
Capabilities can also be added to or removed from a role, and new roles can be defined. That is plugin and developer territory rather than a screen you click, and it is worth knowing it exists so you understand what a membership or e-commerce plugin has done when a role you did not create appears in your list.
The six roles, in WordPress's own words
These are the summaries the WordPress.org documentation gives, quoted directly.
- Super Admin: "somebody with access to the site network administration features and all other features." Multisite only.
- Administrator: "somebody who has access to all the administration features within a single site."
- Editor: "somebody who can publish and manage posts including the posts of other users."
- Author: "somebody who can publish and manage their own posts."
- Contributor: "somebody who can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them."
- Subscriber: "somebody who can only manage their profile."
Read the Contributor line twice, because it is the most useful role most site owners never use. A Contributor can write and edit their own drafts and cannot publish them, which is exactly the arrangement most people actually want when they say they want a writer.
Administrator is the role that can end your site
This is the part that deserves the caution, and it is the reason the role choice is not an administrative detail.
On a single-site install, an Administrator can install and delete plugins and themes, edit plugin and theme files, update WordPress core itself, and create, edit and delete other users. WordPress's documentation lists those separately as capabilities that only single-site Administrators hold, because on Multisite they belong to the Super Admin instead.
Every one of those actions can take a site offline, and several of them cannot be undone from inside the admin once they have gone wrong. Deleting a plugin removes it and, in most cases, its settings. Editing a theme file directly can produce a site that will not load. Handing that ability to someone who only needed to fix typos is how a Tuesday becomes an incident.
It also decides who can change how your site updates itself, which is a policy decision rather than a task, and worth settling deliberately before it is delegated. If you are working out who is allowed to turn automatic updates on, the answer on a single site is the same short list as everything else in this paragraph.
The practical rule: one Administrator, or two if you genuinely need a backup, and everyone else lower. Not because your collaborators are careless, but because an account that cannot install a plugin also cannot be used to install one if it is ever compromised.
Matching the role to the job
Four situations cover most of what a one-person site actually needs.
Someone writes for you and you want to read it first. Contributor. They draft, you publish. Note that Contributors cannot upload files, so images will have to come from you or the role has to change.
Someone writes for you and you trust them to publish. Author. They publish and manage their own posts, and cannot touch anyone else's.
Someone runs the content side, including other people's posts, categories and comments. Editor. This is the highest role that cannot install anything, and for that reason it is the right ceiling for almost every collaborator.
Someone is a member, customer or commenter. Subscriber, which manages a profile and nothing else.
A developer or a support agent who genuinely needs to install something is the only case for Administrator, and it should be a temporary arrangement rather than a permanent account. Note down when it was granted so you can revisit it.
The three capabilities worth understanding by name
Most capabilities never need thinking about. Three explain things that surprise people.
manage_options governs the Settings screens. Any setting stored at site level, including anything a plugin adds to Settings, sits behind it, and it belongs to Administrators. That includes an API key stored in your site's settings, which is a good illustration of why the role that reaches Settings is the role you hand out most carefully: a key is a credential, and a credential in a settings field is readable by anyone who can open that screen.
unfiltered_html allows a user to post raw HTML and script in content. WordPress's documentation warns in its own note that enabling this for untrusted users "may result in their posting malicious or poorly formatted code," and it records that on Multisite only Super Admins hold it. This is why a role that looks harmless on paper is not automatically harmless in practice.
promote_users is the one that enables the "Change role to…" control in the user list, and the documentation notes that it does not depend on the edit_users capability. In other words, being able to change someone's role and being able to edit their account are two separate permissions, which is worth knowing when a plugin claims to have limited someone.
Where roles are set, described by function
We have not seen this screen on a 7.x install, so what follows is by function with the source named rather than a click path with labels we cannot confirm.
A user's role is set when the account is created and can be changed afterwards from the user list, through the role control that promote_users enables. The Users area is where both happen, and it is reached from the main admin menu by anyone whose role permits it.
The role given to brand new accounts is a site setting, and WordPress's documentation places it under Settings, General. If your site allows registration, that default is the single most consequential field on that screen, and it should be Subscriber unless you have a specific reason otherwise.
If the Users menu is not visible to you at all, that is the role model working: WordPress shows each account only what its role permits. Finding where these live in the current interface is a question of finding the Users screen in the admin as it stands now rather than of anything having been removed.
Two things this article does not tell you
It does not tell you what your specific plugins have done to your roles. Membership, e-commerce, learning and forum plugins routinely add roles and add capabilities to existing ones, and the only place that is documented is each plugin's own documentation.
And it does not give you a click path with screen labels, because we have verified the role model from WordPress's own documentation and have not viewed a 7.1 Users screen ourselves. Where this article describes a screen, it describes what the screen does. That is the honest limit and it is stated rather than papered over.
FAQ
What is the difference between Author and Contributor in WordPress?
An Author "can publish and manage their own posts". A Contributor "can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them", and cannot upload files. If you want to read something before it goes live, Contributor is the role.
Should I give someone Administrator access?
Only if they genuinely need to install, delete or update plugins, themes or WordPress itself, because those are the capabilities that can take a site offline. Editor is the highest role that cannot install anything, and it covers almost every content collaborator.
Can an Editor install plugins?
No. On a single site, installing, updating and deleting plugins and themes are capabilities WordPress assigns to the Administrator, and its documentation lists them separately for that reason.
What role should new registered users get?
Subscriber, unless you have a specific reason otherwise. The default for new accounts is a site setting, which WordPress's documentation places under Settings, General.
Did WordPress 7.0 or 7.1 change user roles?
Nothing in this article claims either release changed the role model, and we have not found a source saying so. What has changed twice since the roles documentation was last updated is the admin interface around it, which is why an older screenshot of the Users screen may not match yours.
