How to manage membership roles in WordPress

List what each member type should be able to do before changing any users. For example, a basic member may only need read, while a tutor may need permission to create or manage their own course content.

Use the least powerful role that meets the requirement. Do not give members Administrator access just to make a protected area work. WordPress roles are collections of capabilities, and access checks should normally be based on capabilities rather than role names.

Go to Users → All Users and inspect the roles already assigned. WordPress includes roles such as Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator, with different capability sets. You can edit a user and choose a role from the profile screen, or filter the users list by role.

Write down the current role for test accounts before changing anything. This gives you a way back if a membership change removes access that the user still needs.

For a small site, the built-in roles may be enough. If not, create a custom role with only the capabilities required for that membership type. You can do this in code with WordPress role functions, or use a role-management plugin that provides an admin interface.

When creating roles in code, register them during plugin activation or another controlled setup event rather than adding them repeatedly on every request. WordPress stores role capabilities in the database, and changing a role persists until you explicitly change it again.

For a small membership site, open Users → All Users, edit each member, select the appropriate role and save. Repeat the process when a member upgrades, downgrades or leaves.

This manual route is genuinely fine when you have few members and changes are occasional. It becomes risky when membership status is tied to payment or expiry: a forgotten downgrade can leave someone with permissions they should no longer have. Also check whether a user has multiple roles, because combined capabilities can grant more access than you intended.

WordPress core has roles and capabilities, but it does not provide membership levels, subscription states or automatic role changes. To synchronise those states, your membership or LMS system must assign a role when someone joins and remove or replace it when the membership changes.

If you build this yourself, use the membership plugin’s documented events and WordPress’s user-role APIs. Test signup, renewal, upgrade, downgrade, cancellation and expiry separately. Do not assume that removing a membership automatically restores the previous role; many systems fall back to the site’s default role instead.

The fast way is to use Paid Memberships Pro with its Roles for Membership Levels Add On. The Add On creates a custom WordPress role for each membership level and adds role settings to the membership-level editor. Go to Memberships → Add Ons to install it, then edit a level under Memberships → Settings → Memberships Levels and choose the role or roles in the role settings.

New members receive the configured role, while cancellation or removal removes the custom membership role and assigns the site default role. Existing members keep their current roles unless you update them separately, so check current accounts before going live. The generated roles start with Subscriber-like capabilities, which you can then adjust carefully.