Depending on the type of site you are creating in WordPress, there are certain settings that you will need to have enabled to achieve the functionality you want. For example, if you are creating an ecommerce store, then you probably want to let customers create user accounts so that they can generate orders, view order histories, and generally use your ecommerce site in the manner to which they have become accustomed with other sites.
But if your site is purely informational, and you don’t really have a need for people to register, then disabling user registration might be the right choice. Mainly it will prevent spam bots from generating user accounts so that they can try and add comments to your posts.
How to Allow or Block People from Creating User Accounts on Your WordPress Site
The steps in this article were performed in the 5.2 version of WordPress. Note that disabling registration will not entirely prevent the creation of new accounts. Administrators on the site will still be able to create new accounts by following the steps in this article. Disabling registration will simply prevent the creation of new accounts from the public-facing part of your site.
Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your WordPress site at (yourdomain.com)/wp-admin.
Step 2: Hover over Settings in the left column, then choose the General option.
Step 3: Check, or clear the check mark from, the box to the left of Anyone can register. In the image below I have blocked users from registering on my site. If you are allowing registration, then you may wish to change the setting next to New User Default Role depending on the type of account you wish to give to new users.
Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of the window and click the Save Changes button.
If you are blocking user registration on your site, then you can add this to the end of your site address – /wp-login.php?action=register – and you should be able to confirm that user registration is disabled on your site.
Looking for ways to improve the SEO performance of your WordPress site? A good place to start is the Yoast SEO plugin. It manages many of the important SEO elements of your site, and is one of the most popular SEO plugins out there.