How to Create WordPress User Accounts [5 Steps!]

Learn how to create WordPress user accounts step-by-step. Discover the best tips for managing users, assigning roles, and improving your site’s security.

Approximate read time: 7 minutes

Creating WordPress user accounts can be a headache, especially when managing a website.

Constantly adding users isn't only tedious. It's also an easy way to make errors. It'd be great if there were an easier way. Luckily, that only takes using a WordPress user registration plugin to simplify things.

So, this post will show you how to create WordPress user accounts in a few simple steps. Whether a freelancer or a site owner, this guide will make it easy

Let's get started.

Why user accounts are important for a WordPress website

Setting up WordPress user accounts has many benefits for you and site visitors.

Here are a few key reasons why they’re worth the effort:

1. Personalized experience: User accounts let visitors access gated content, track orders, and more. This makes your site more engaging and keeps people coming back.
2. Easier site management: Assigning roles and permissions to team members or contributors means you don’t have to manage everything manually. A huge time-saver.
3. Increased user engagement: Allowing users to create accounts encourages them to interact more — whether commenting, signing up, or contributing user-generated content.
4. Better access control: You can assign roles like editor, contributor, or subscriber to control who accesses certain parts of a site. This keeps everything organized and secure.

Setting up user accounts can improve visitors' experiences and make site management much easier.

Read more: How to Edit WordPress User Profiles on the Front End

Sites that benefit from a user registration form

Any site that has user-generated content benefits from user registration.

Generally speaking, the following types of sites should allow users to register themselves or sign up in some way:

• Membership sites
• Subscription-based sites
• Sites with multiple writers and employees or accepting guest blog posts
• eCommerce sites

Subscriber and member-based websites depend upon increasing numbers of members. That’s a given. But as we’ve seen above, nearly every website that wants to provide a better user experience, better-segmented marketing, or allow for user-generated content can benefit from adding user registration.

A word about guest blog contributions: we looked at the benefits of guest blogging.

With only a few guest contributors, it’s not a big deal for you to create user accounts on your WordPress site for them. If you have more than a few, however, you could save yourself time and provide a better experience for them by allowing guests to register themselves.

What can be done with user registration?

The Formidable Forms User Registration Add-On allows you to create user accounts on your WordPress site.

What you do with these user accounts depends on the website, but here are some things you can do with the add-on:

• Add a login form to any page or widget on your site
• Allow users to create their own accounts on your site with a sign-up registration form
• Users can upload a profile pic or avatar.
• Allow users to update their profile and change their password. (Note: Currently, users can’t change their usernames since WordPress doesn’t allow this by default, but they can change their password and other profile values.)
• Confirm the user’s email address before registration is completed.

How to create WordPress user accounts

There are a few different ways to enable user registration.

If users will be added manually, you can use the default Users page in WordPress.

Go to the WordPress Users page and click the Add New user button. This page offers the option to set the email address, set the WordPress user roles, autogenerate the password, and send an email to the new user.

On the other hand, you can also let visitors create their own accounts.

The easiest way is using Formidable Forms, the most advanced WordPress form builder. It can be an entire user registration solution for any WordPress website, from building user registration forms to creating a login form and managing accounts.

The User Registration add-on is included in the Formidable Forms Pro Business plan, so grab Formidable Forms to get started.

Then, it's a few easy steps:

Prefer video? Then check out the video below 👇

Step 1: Install and activate Formidable Forms and the User Registration add-on

Once you have Formidable Forms Pro, follow this guide to install and activate the plugin on a WordPress website, then confirm your license.

Next, go to Formidable → Add-Ons in the WordPress dashboard, find the User Registration add-on, and click Install.

If you have trouble with this step, check out our helpful instructions in the docs.

Once that's activated, it's time to create a registration form.

Step 2: Create the required user account pages

For the user registration, there are a few pages you need to set up first:

1. Login/Logout page
2. Reset Password page
3. Registration page

So go to the Pages dashboard on the WordPress site and create three pages for each.

If you need help, check out our guide on creating a custom login page.

After, go to Formidable → Global Settings → Registration and set these pages under the Global Pages section.

For more information on setting up and selecting these pages, check out our docs.

Step 3: Create a registration form

To start creating a form, go to Formidable → Forms and click the Add New button.

Next, you have three options:

1. Create a blank form
2. Use a pre-built WordPress form template
3. Use the AI form builder

For our example, we'll create a blank form to design it from scratch.

You can add whatever fields you need, but Formidable Forms only requires Email and User ID fields for user accounts. Adding other fields, like Name and Password fields, is not a bad idea, as they allow users to log in and out easily.

Formidable Forms has a Simple User Registration Form template, which is great for getting up and running fast. These are the fields it includes:

Feel free to customize the form to meet your needs. When you finish editing it, click the Save button and give it a name.

You can also sign up multiple accounts using the Repeater field if necessary. For example, registering for school clubs or sports teams may require multiple accounts. So, instead of creating each of those manually, you can add a Repeater field for users to create multiple accounts simultaneously.

For more on it, check out the video below:

Step 4: Add the Register User action

Next, click the Settings button at the top of the form builder. Then, go to Actions & Notifications and find the Register User action.

A small tab appears below the Form Actions section (if you use the template, it's already there). Under the tab, there are a few options to customize the form action:

Connect the Email Address field under the User Email section, and do the same for the other fields you have in the form.

If your goal is to make it as easy as possible for a new user to begin accessing content or functionality restricted to members immediately, perhaps you’ll want to check the box Automatically log in users who submit this form.

Step 5: Publish the form on the website

The last step is to add the registration form to the registration page created in step two.

So go to that page and add a new WordPress block. Then, find the Formidable Forms block and add it.

The Formidable Forms block has a dropdown menu where you can choose the form to display. The registration form will automatically appear. Then, you just have to update the page, and everything is ready.

Stop registration spam

Now, you can easily set up user accounts on any WordPress site.

But one thing to look out for is registration spam. It can clog up an inbox and registration form entries.

So, check out our post on how to stop WordPress registration spam before it starts. And, if you're ready to get started, grab Formidable Forms Pro today to try it out risk-free for 14 days!

Also, join our community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube for more WordPress tips & tricks!

Read more of our user registration posts

• Formidable Forms' NEW User Registration Repeater Speeds Up Creating User Accounts
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  7 Best Ways To Stop WordPress Registration Spam
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  How To Create a WordPress Custom Login Page [Step by Step]
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