How to Enable or Disable User Registration in WordPress

if you already have a bunch of user accounts on your WordPress site that you don’t want, then you can delete them.

Navigate to the WordPress dashboard, then select Users in the left column.

You can then hover over the user that you want to remove from your site and click the Delete option.

If you need to get rid of a lot of users then you can check the box next to each one that you want to delete, then click the Bulk Actions dropdown menu at the top of the window and choose the Delete option there instead.

Note that if you had a register link and the default WordPress registration page was active for a while, then you will probably need to remove a bunch of spam user registrations.

it’s also likely that many of these spam registrations will have added some comments after their account creation, so you may also want to check any feedback forms and delete unwanted comments.

If you have comments enabled on your WordPress site and you either don’t want or need them, then you can save yourself some hassle by turning them off.

Sign into your dashboard, hover over Settings in the left column, then choose Discussion.

Here you can turn off this setting:
– Allow people to submit comments on new posts

Then you can enable these options:
– Comment author must fill out name and email
– Users must be registered and logged in to comment (if you’ve turned off user registration with the steps above then these work really well together)
– Automatically close comments on posts older than 1 day
– Comment must be manually approved
– Comment author must have a previously approved comment

I will also usually put the maximum number of links allowed at “1”.

This combination of settings will pretty much stop all comments on your site, but you can also try some plugins which can take care of this for you.

Once you have followed the steps above you can go to the registration page by adding this registration link –

/wp-login.php?action=register

to the end of your site’s URL.

You will still see a registration form on that page, but there will be a banner at the top of the page to indicate that the user registration feature is no longer active.

Note that this will not affect your regular login page, and anyone that has previously completed WordPress registration on your site will still be able to access their dashboard.

If you want to let users register on your site, then there isn’t a great way to disable WP registration for some types of things but still allow new user registration for real users.

You can try setting up a Captcha for new user registrations, which can be somewhat helpful in keeping new user accounts active but limited to real people, but it’s not completely effective at stopping spammers from creating a user account on your WordPress website.

if you aren’t going to disable registration, then you might decide to adjust the membership setting for people that create accounts.

You can do this by going to the General Settings page in your dashboard, then clicking the New User Default Role dropdown menu and choosing from these options:

– Subscriber
– Contributor
– Editor
– Author
– Administrator

The default membership option you choose will depend on the types of user roles you are expecting on your site, but each of these different roles has different permissions and will be able to adjust varying levels of content and settings on your site, so it’s important to be careful when making a selection here.