Members – Membership & User Role Editor Plugin

Members and MemberPress solve different problems and are designed to work together.

Members is a free roles and capabilities plugin. It gives you a UI on top of WordPress’ native roles and capabilities system so you can create and edit roles, assign multiple roles to users, and restrict content by role or capability. It’s the right tool when you need to control who can do what inside your site (dashboard access, content permissions, and capability management) without charging for access.

MemberPress is a premium, all-in-one WordPress membership platform built for monetization and much more. In addition to paid subscriptions, payment processing (Stripe, PayPal, and more), recurring billing, coupons, and drip content, MemberPress also includes:

• Rules that protect whole categories, tags, post types, or URLs, and cover new content automatically.
• Downloads to protect files like PDFs, which Members can’t protect.
• Courses , a built-in LMS for creating and selling online courses with lessons, quizzes, and progress tracking.
• CoachKit , for running coaching programs with milestones, habits, and client check-ins.
• ClubSuite , with member profiles and directories (ClubDirectory), private discussion spaces (ClubCircles), and messaging (ClubConnect).
• Email marketing integrations , gifting, corporate accounts, and many more premium features.

It’s the right tool when you need to sell access to content, courses, coaching, or communities, and grow a full membership business around it.

The two plugins are complementary, not competing. Many sites use Members for fine-grained role and capability management alongside MemberPress for everything membership-business related. For a full side-by-side comparison, see Members vs MemberPress .

Yes, keep it for roles and capabilities, but let MemberPress handle all content protection. When both plugins protect the same page, visitors have to pass both checks, which leads to paying members who still can’t see content. Turn off Enable Permissions under Members > Settings , recreate your protection as MemberPress Rules, and turn off Private Site so your sales pages stay public. The step-by-step upgrade guide walks through it.

Edit the page and tick every role in the Content Permissions box (or the Content Permissions (Members) panel in the block editor). Visitors need at least one of the ticked roles. To make the whole site private instead, turn on Private Site under Members > Settings . See Content Permissions .

Content Permissions protects the post content, excerpt, and comments. It doesn’t hide titles, menus, search results, custom fields, or uploaded files. See what Content Permissions doesn’t protect . To protect files, use MemberPress Downloads .

Content Permissions works with the block editor, the classic editor, and Bricks Builder. Breakdance needs one setting turned on, and some builders don’t pass content through WordPress in a way Members can protect. On WooCommerce products, only the description is hidden. See page builders and themes .

Members hides protected posts from the WordPress REST API by default, and Private Site has an option that blocks the REST API for logged-out visitors. Either can hide content that a calendar or app loads through the REST API. See the REST API settings .

The role is missing the read capability, which every role needs to use the dashboard. See the Capabilities Guide .

Turn on the Admin Access add-on under Members > Add-Ons , then untick their roles under Members > Settings > Admin Access . See Admin Access .

Add the [members_login_form] shortcode to any page (use a Shortcode block in the block editor), or add the Members Login Form widget with a Legacy Widget block. You can also put the shortcode in the Content Permissions error message, so visitors can log in right where protected content would be. The form works with Wordfence and Two Factor two-factor authentication. See Shortcodes .

No. Members manages permissions. For registration forms, use WPForms . For paid memberships, registration, and account pages, use MemberPress . See what Members doesn’t do for more.

Members saves your changes straight to the database. If they change back, another plugin is resetting that role. See Role Management for how to find it.

Yes. On the Roles screen, use Export All to download a JSON file containing every role, its capabilities, and your Members plugin settings. To export only some roles, select them in the roles table and choose Export from the Bulk Actions menu.

To import roles, upload a Members export JSON file from the same screen and click Upload and Preview . Members will show each role before anything is changed, so you can import new roles, skip roles, overwrite existing roles, or import conflicting roles under a new slug. Protected roles, such as the built-in Administrator role, your current role, and the site’s default role, cannot be overwritten or renamed.

No. Members edits WordPress’ own roles, so your changes stay after you deactivate or delete it. To undo them first, delete your custom roles and use Reset Roles under Members > Settings . See Uninstalling Members .

Yes. Each site has its own roles, so use Import / Export to copy them between sites. See Multisite .

If you have a multisite installation, only Super Admins can create, edit, and delete roles by default. This is a security measure to make sure that you absolutely trust sub-site admins to make these types of changes to roles. If you’re certain you want to allow this, add the Create Roles ( create_roles ), Edit Roles ( edit_roles ), and/or Delete Roles ( delete_roles ) capabilities to the role on each sub-site where you want to allow this.

When the plugin is first activated, it runs a script that sets specific capabilities to the “Administrator” role on your site that grants you access to this feature. So, you must be logged in with the administrator account to access the role manager.

Also check that Role Manager is turned on under Members > Settings . If you do have the administrator role and the role manager is still inaccessible to you, deactivate the plugin, then reactivate it.

You decide how much it can do. It starts in read-only mode, so it can only look things up until you turn that off in Members → Settings → AI (MCP) . You can also switch off whole areas, like managing users’ roles. It can only do what your own account is allowed to do.

When changes are allowed, risky ones (taking capabilities away from people, deleting a role, making restricted content public, turning on a private site and so on) aren’t made straight away. The assistant first gets a plain-words warning to show you, and the change only happens if you say yes. Changes that would lock you out of your own site are always refused. Every action is listed in the activity log on that tab, with the old values.

Any app that can run local MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, including Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and OpenAI Codex. They connect through the free official WordPress MCP Adapter plugin, which needs WordPress 6.9 or newer. Apps that only connect to remote servers with OAuth sign-in, like ChatGPT and Claude on the web, don’t work yet.

If you can no longer access the WordPress admin (for example, after changing your role or capabilities), you can restore your Administrator access yourself:

1. 01Go to your site’s login page: yoursite.com/wp-login.php
2. 02In the address bar, add ?action=members_rescue so the URL is: yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=members_rescue
3. 03Enter the email address of an account that has (or had) the built-in Administrator role, or is a Super Admin (multisite).
4. 04Click “Send Rescue Link”. If that account is eligible, a secure link will be sent to that email (you may need to check spam).
5. 05Open the link from the email within 15 minutes. Your Administrator role and Members capabilities will be restored, and you’ll be redirected to the login page to sign in.

Only users with the built-in WordPress “Administrator” role (or Super Admins on multisite) can use this feature; custom or cloned roles are not eligible. The link expires after 15 minutes and is limited to a few attempts per IP to prevent abuse.

The link is emailed by your site, so it only arrives if your site can send email. The free WP Mail SMTP plugin makes WordPress email reliable.

Please read the documentation for the plugin before actually using it, especially a plugin that controls permissions for your site. We cannot stress this enough. This is a powerful plugin that allows you to make direct changes to roles and capabilities in the database.

If you have the built-in Administrator role (or are a Super Admin on multisite) but lost access to the admin (e.g. after editing roles), try the Administrator Rescue (Magic Link) first: go to yoursite.com/wp-login.php?action=members_rescue , enter your admin email, and use the link we send you to restore access.

If that doesn’t apply or didn’t work, stop by our support forums to see if we can help. Your web host may also be able to restore your site from a recent backup, bu