Are you a WordPress blogger or going to start blogging with the most popular blogging platform? If you are looking for the details of user roles of WordPress blogs, this post will help you with the details of the topic. There are several built-in user roles in WordPress blogs that enable registered users to perform based on the assigned roles.

Do you own a personal WordPress blog?

If you own a personal blog and performing all the tasks by yourself that means no need other users to log in your blog then I think this post is not so important for you but I would like to recommend two things that you need do in your personal blog.

Firstly, you can disable WordPress blog user registration. You can do this navigating to the Dashboard >> Settings >> General and finally uncheck registration of new users.

Secondly, you can change the default admin name to your personal name. This can be done from Dashboard >> Users >> Edit your admin account and complete the form with first and last name, and then set the function “Display name publicly” as your full name.

Do you own a WordPress blog that you want to open for all users?

Let’s see what is inside the WordPress user roles. If you like more user performance in your blog, you can assign them based on their roles. In the latest WordPress system, there are five user roles. These are administrator, editor, Author, contributor and subscriber.

For the sake of my readers, I would like to describe each role with its ability that can be performed in the blog.

How you can assign user roles in the dashboard?

All new users are ascribed as subscriber by default in the WordPress blog. If you are administrator, you need to change the user roles that all new users can perform after sign up into your blog. You can do it visiting Dashboard >> Users >> Authors and Users >> Edit the information of Users >> Select the role from drop down and finally set the level of user.

Roles of Five User Types in WordPress blog

Administrator
Admin is the top user in the WordPress blog. Users with admin power can do anything and everything in the blog. They can change all settings including theme change, plugin installation, page or post change, user roles change, etc.

Editor
Editors are allowed to do everything regarding the blog post and page. Simply from the term editor we can understand what it can do. Apart from changing the look of the blog, editor can perform all other things that related to WordPress blog. For instance, they can publish new page and post, can see other posts and page and can also change or delete others posts. In a word, editors are able to, and control over all pages and posts in the blog. In WordPress blog, only editor and admin can control and see private posts and pages.

Author
Simply author means a writer who can only write for your blog. They only can create, modify and delete their blog posts. They can also upload picture and videos in their blog posts. They only have control over their content and can read other same level authors and blog contributors posts, but can’t delete or edit anything in system.

Contributor
In WordPress blog, contributors only can provide content for your blog, they don’t have access to publish, edit and delete posts from the blog. They can save posts as draft for the authorization by admin or editor.

Subscriber
Subscribers are actually same as other visitors or unregistered visitors. You may ask why we need subscriber for blog. Actually, there are many blogs that have only access for registered users so, this type of users may not important for you but the role is important for those blogs.

Finally, I would like to alert you, whatever the user level is in your blog, always remember to protect your admin information safe to keep your blog and content from hacking.

Appifier is a new service, previously in beta, that turns WordPress sites into mobile apps. That’s not mobile websites, mind you, but actual mobile applications complete with push notifications, offline access, Twitter and Facebook sharing, plus a native look, feel and speed.

Unlike many DIY app creators (and there are many), Appifier isn’t doing a freemium offering. You can test out your app for free, but if you want to publish it in the app store, there are fees involved.

Read more from TechCrunch

By default WordPress is one of the most search engine friendly Content Management System (CMS). But by the grace of ever-growing WordPress developers community, there are tons of SEO plugins available and you can tweak your blog to go extra miles. We have compiled a list of to 15 WordPress SEO plugins that you can use to improve your ranking and get more traffic.

WordPress SEO Plugins

1. All in SEO Pack This plugin in one of the most downloaded and well-known SEO plugin for WordPress. Even though it has a Pro Version, still I believe it’s free version offers enough SEO features; like custom meta data, Canonical URLs, custom Page Title etc.
2. WordPress SEO This plugin has been developed by Joost de Valk, well-known blogger and WordPress SEO Consultant. I would say it’s 2nd generation WordPress SEO plugins, (All in SEO Pack is 1st Generation). It offers much more SEO features Post titles and meta descriptions, Robots Meta configuration, Canonical URL, Breadcrumbs, Permalink clean up, XML Sitemaps etc. I like the way it shows Snippet Preview while composing any post.

WordPress SEO Plugin - Meta Tags Preview

WordPress Plugins for XML Sitemap

3. Google XML Sitemap This is another top downloaded WordPress plugin. This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.

WordPress Plugins for HTML Sitemap

4. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator This is a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more. Unfortunately, this plugin is not available in WordPress plugin directory. You will need to download the plugin directly from its author’s website.

WordPress Plugins for Content Optimisation

5. Scribe SEO This is a premium WordPress plugin by Copyblogger Media. It helps you in keyword research, high quality content creation for both readers and search engines and finally in link building. Its subscription starts from $17 per month.

Scribe SEO - SEO Review Score

WordPress Plugins for Fast Loading Blogs

Google has already declared loading speed is one of the factors it consider to rank a page in search engine. The lower loading time you can achieve, the better chance you have to rank you page higher in the search result. Load speed has became a factor in ranking now. So here is a list of plugins to load your WordPress blog fast.

6. W3 Total Cache Trusted and recommended by top web hosts and top websites; W3 Total Cache is the most complete WordPress performance framework. W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. Personally I use this plugin in my own blogs and recommend my clients to use in their blogs too.
7. WP Super Cache With more than 2.5+ million downloads, this is the most download WordPress caching plugin. It generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
8. DB Cache Reloaded This plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. Sometimes it is much faster than other html caching plugins and uses less disk space for caching.
9. WP Minify This plugin grabs JS/CSS files in your generated WordPress page and passes that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then returns a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify and place them at the footer.

WordPress Plugins for Show Related Posts

10. Yet Another Related Post Plugin This is my favourite plugin to show related posts for each blog post. This plugin uses a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories to find related plugins. Again this plugin is highly customisable and fits any WordPress theme nicely.

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

WordPress Plugins for Search Engine Friendly Links

11. Redirection It is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.
12. Automatic SEO Links Forget to put manually your links, just choose a word and a URL and this plugin will replace all matches in the posts of your blog.
13. SEO Slugs This WordPress plugin removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from post slugs to improve search engine optimization.
14. SEO Smart Links SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

WordPress Plugins to Optimize Images

15. SEO Friendly Images SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress SEO plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

SEO Friendly Images

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has relaunched the Civil Service website using the WordPress blog tool, one of the most widely used content management systems on the internet.

Details of the project have been made public on the GDS blog, which says the website was relaunched on 30 September. The approach contrasts with that used for the previous iteration of the site in 2008, which involved the customisation of an off-the-shelf content management system. The blog says this initially worked well but became dated and inflexible and incurred considerable hosting costs.

We (the Digital Engagement team) were tasked with producing a new site at very little cost and within a six week window. To restructure the content to make it easier to find we used Google analytics to analyse typical user journeys. Harnessing user insight will be an iterative process through the ongoing development of this site.

We chose to use WordPress as it offers a simple, quick (with such a short development window) and flexible open source solution to a site primarily designed for publishing content. As such it is easy to use for a wide range of content editors and, of course, provides significant cost savings for maintenance and development. Rather than develop a theme ourselves we chose to use a theme called ‘striking’ developed by Kaptinlin that fitted what we needed with a little customisation.

Using WordPress also means we can tap into the plug-ins that the large WordPress developer community creates to solve problems that would have caused major work. For example using a WP plug-in to amend some of the 30,000+ links that were migrated saved time and stress when faced with a tight deadline. We needed to compress the initial 500 page offering with 2649 media files, the vast majority being.pdf documents, to 320 by using the theme’s tabbing function on pages.

Further References:

• ThemeForest Striking WordPress Theme
• Government uses WordPress for Civil Service website
• Holding the fort: developing a new Civilservice.gov.uk

Sometimes, you just have to say it with video. It’s a great way to add a little liveliness to your blog. With VideoPress, it’s simple—just upload your video and WordPress will convert it to the right formats for sharing on the web (including an HD option for high-definition video).

VideoPress is a paid service from WordPress and currently costs $59.97 per year. The VideoPress plugin allows blog administrators to upload new videos to their WordPress.com video account and manage existing videos from the convenience of their self-hosted WordPress.org blog’s administrative interface. Authors can add any VideoPress video into a blog post through the use of a simple shortcode and customizations.

Here is a video on how to upgrade your WordPress.com account to use VideoPress and install / configure it in your self hosted WordPress blog.

If you are a small or medium-size business owner, (or you are just a blogger) and you are looking for SEO and Social Media Consultancy, why don’t you drop an email and let us show how we can help you to grow your business.