HOW TO: Add a User In WordPress, Admin Login, User Roles in WordPress. Set Profile Picture on Gravatar.

[Guide for Beginners to Earning Money Online – Part 6]

In this article, you’ll learn how to add a user in WordPress. You’d want to manage your website as a real person and not under a default ‘admin’ account. We’ll give this new user full administrative rights to manage your website.

I’ll explain all available user roles in WordPress. If you have a team working on your website, you’d be able to add a user for each team member. Depending on the members’ roles, you’d be able to give them full or limited access to managing your site.

You’ll also learn how to set a user profile picture via Gravatar. 

Add A User In WordPress

If you are following my Guide for Beginners to Earning Money Online, you know that we’ve built a free WordPress website in the previous posts and videos. We’ve chosen and customized the theme, prepared our sites for SEO, and added initial content to it. I’ve explained how to write quality content and use relevant images to illustrate and complement the content.

I hope that you started publishing new posts to your website consistently, and your website is growing and taking a good shape.

But you still work on your website under the default ‘admin’ account that was created when your website was built. You’ll earn trust from your visitors quicker and easier if you act under your real name or your pen name and not as an impersonal ‘admin’.

For more information on why it’s important to present yourself to your audience as a real person, please refer to this article. 

I will now show you how to add a user in WordPress that will represent the real you and personalize this new user even further by adding your picture.

You may prefer to watch the video in the following section.

As always, log in to the WordPress back office as an ‘admin’ from your “Websites” menu on the Wealthy Affiliate dashboard. If you are moving along with my pace, the only user you currently have is default ‘admin’. 

If you are not hosting your website at Wealthy Affiliate yet, I encourage you to consider switching your web hosting provider as Wealthy Affiliate offers fantastic value for an unbeatable price. Follow this link to read the Wealthy Affiliate review.

For now, you can log in your usual way, or type the WordPress admin login URL in the address bar of your browser: https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/
where ‘yourdomain.com‘ indicates the actual name of your own domain.

As an example, my direct WordPress admin login URL to this website’s dashboard is https://livewealthyretirement.com/wp-admin/

Then, you’d need to enter your username or email address and password.

Once in the back office, find “Users” in the left-hand side menu. 

If ‘admin’ is the only user account you currently have, you’d see the only row in the central table for this user. Please also note that it says “Howdy, admin” in the top-right corner of your WordPress dashboard screen, and there is a standard avatar in place of a picture. 

To add a new user, click the “Add New” button above the central table.

At this time, we are going to add you as a new user and give you full administrative rights – exactly the same set of rights as ‘admin’ has.

If you have a team working on your website, you’d be able to add all your team members in a similar way and assign an appropriate role to each member. I’ll explain the user roles shortly.

Fill in fields 1 – 5 in the form with your personal information. 

Please note that the username cannot be changed once the user has been added.

For the password, Wealthy Affiliate members will see the message: “A secure password will be generated for you and displayed after adding this user”. This is because Wealthy Affiliate synchronizes WordPress with its own platform for your easy access in the future. 

If you are not a member at Wealthy Affiliate yet, you’ll see a button in place of this message with the caption “Show Password”. Click the button to get your auto-generated password. Make sure that you save it somewhere in a secure place.

Send User Notification. You’d probably want to keep this checkbox checked when adding your team members. Since at this time you are adding a user account for yourself, it’s your choice to keep it ON or turn it OFF.

User Role. Select ‘Administrator’ from the drop-down list to give yourself full access to managing your website. See explanation of each role in the chapter titled “User Roles in WordPress”

Click the “Add New User” button.

You’ve just added a new user. 

Being a Wealthy Affiliate member, you can now see the password for the new user. You don’t need to save or remember it, Wealthy Affiliate will do it for you. When you need it, you’ll also be able to reset this password from the WA SiteManager platform. 

Remember that you are still logged in as an ‘admin’. A user assigned an Administrator role can add, delete or modify other users’ profiles, but ‘admin’ cannot set other people’s profile pictures.

Please note that I missed the following property in the video, and unintentionally gave misleading information
about the “Display Name”. 
I apologize for my mistake. Here are the correct instructions.

Let’s select “Edit” under Julia’s profile and change one setting before we log out from the ‘admin’ account. This setting is “Display name publicly as”. You can choose to display your first name only, last name only, full name – first and then last, or your full name in reverse order.

Save changes you’ve made by clicking the “Update User” button. 

Log out ‘admin’ user: move your mouse to the top right corner of the page, click where it says “Howdy, admin” and select “Log Out”. 

How To Add Profile Picture In WordPress.

You can watch the video or proceed with reading…

Please note that I made one misleading comment in the video about the user’s publicly displayed name. This mistake is corrected in the section above (under the message in the red font).

Create a Gravatar Account

WordPress uses Gravatar to display profile pictures. The picture added to your WordPress profile via Gravatar will follow you when you comment on other websites.

The picture below shows my comment on someone else’s post accompanied by my Gravatar picture and my username. I also sign my comment with my real name, which is optional. I appreciate the fact that the owner responded to me, and he acted under his own username – Travis. Unfortunately, Travis didn’t add his profile picture, which makes me feel like I’m talking to someone behind a wall or a curtain as I can’t see the face of my interlocutor. I would feel more comfortable and trust Travis better if he showed his face. Many readers feel the same way. 

Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar

Gravatar direct URL is https://en.gravatar.com/ 
where ‘en’ is the subdomain for English. It will change depending on the language set as default in your browser:
https://de.gravatar.com/ – German
https://fr.gravatar.com/ – French, etc.

However, Gravatar is integrated with WordPress, and we will access it via our WordPress account.

For those of you, who are not with Wealthy Affiliate, go ahead and log in to WordPress under the username you’ve just created.

Wealthy Affiliate members, take this extra step to synchronize your new user with WA platform, which will make your website access much easier in the future.

Go to your Wealthy Affiliate Dashboard, select “Websites” in the menu. Then, instead of using “My Recent Sites” as we did in the past, click on “SiteManager”.

Find your website on the SiteManager platform (it could be the only one you have so far). Click the “Login” blue button, and you’ll see your newly added username in the pop-up window with a green button labeled “Synchronize”. Click this green button to sync your WordPress password. 

Once your password appears on this screen, you’ll also see the “Reset Password” button. You don’t need to reset your password right now, but you may wish to reset it periodically in the future for security reasons. You’d be able to do so right from the WA dashboard. I will definitely reset my passwords right after finishing this post. 🙂

Click the “Login Now” button on the right.

Return to the Users screen, find yourself in the table on the page. As you bring your mouse over your username, you’ll see the small pop-up menu. Select “Edit” on this menu. On the next screen, scroll down to Profile Picture in the “About Yourself” section.

Now, that you are logged in as yourself, you’ll see a link under your profile picture placeholder saying “You can change your profile picture on Gravatar.” Click this link.

In the screenshot above, you see the Gravatar Homepage. Click the “Create Your Own Gravatar” button. After your account is created, you’d choose the “Sign In” button at the top when you need to change your picture or modify account settings.

Fill in a short form providing your email address and creating your username, which can be different from your WordPress username, and password.

Click the “Create your account” button

Gravatar will send you a confirmation email. Check your email Inbox and the Spam folder to locate this email.

The email comes from WordPress.com. The sender’s email address is donotreply@wordpress.com

In this email, click the “Activate Account” button. 

Add New Image to Gravatar

Return to Gravatar Homepage and this time, use the “Sign In” button at the top to log in to your Gravatar account with the username and password you’ve created.

The next page you’ll see is shown in the screenshot below.

Use one of two links on the page to add a new image.

On the next page, you’ll have 4 options:

1. Upload New
2. Past Uploads
3. From URL
4. From webcam

Choose one that is appropriate for you. Most often, people would choose the 1st one: upload a new image from the computer.

The profile picture is displayed in a very small size – either square or circle. As a website owner and a business person, you’d want your image to be high-quality. If using a photo, make sure it’s a clear headshot. 

There is a 1MB file size limit. Upload the best quality picture you have within this limit. Gravatar will resize the large files and you’ll have a chance to crop your image to the square shape.

Also, keep in mind that as a business owner you may want to be consistent with your profile image. Your goal is to build the following and be recognizable on any platform. I suggest using this same image in all your Social Networks as your profile picture.

Below are examples of good professionally-looking Gravatars. 

If using a business logo or other graphical image, it also has to be clear and simple. 

Though, for the beginning bloggers, I recommend acting as a real person and showing your face. This would make it easier for you to establish connections with your readers and gain their trust.

Here are a couple of examples of nice graphical Gravatars:

Once you upload and crop your picture, you’d be offered to set its rating – similar to a movie rating options. If your gravatar is not suitable for children or other sensitive audiences, you could select an appropriate rating. But as the business owners (even if your business is for adults only), we should select an image in the “G” rating category: “This gravatar is suitable for display on all websites with any audience type.”

Finish your setup by clicking “Set Rating”, and you’ll be brought back to the “Manage Gravatars” screen where you’ll see the picture you’ve just added.

Verify Your Newly Created Gravatar

Wealthy Affiliate members, you can return to your Wealthy Affiliate dashboard to re-login to WordPress. As you click the “Log in” button under “My Recent Websites”, you should now see the image you just added next to your username. That’s a good verification that you set up your Gravatar correctly.

Everybody else, log in under your own username to your WordPress dashboard again and check the top right corner of the screen. You should see “Howdy, [your username]” and your new gravatar next to the greeting.

Change Gravatar Picture, Add Email Addresses

In the future, if you need to change your picture, go to your User Profile in the WordPress, click “edit”, scroll down to your profile picture and click the link to Gravatar under it. 

In your Gravatar account, you can also add more email addresses and associate them with the same or a new picture, remove pictures, add new ones, or change the association between emails and pictures. 

To change what picture is attached to which email address, first click on the email address, then select the image you want to go with this email, and click the “Confirm” button.

Below is the screenshot of my other Gravatar account that I created when I built my first website. If I wanted to change the picture associated with LiveWealthyRetirement.com email address, I would first select the email, then photo below, and then click “Confirm”. 

I’d rather click “Cancel” as I don’t really want to change the picture. 🙂

User Roles in WordPress

If you are working on your website with a team, you’d want to add each member of your team as a WordPress user, but give each member only as much access to the website management as this member needs. For example, your authors probably should not be able to add a user to your website or change its theme. Therefore, WordPress uses the Roles concept which enables owners to control what other users can and cannot do. 

There are 6 roles, but when you added yourself as a user, you’ve only seen 5 – ‘Super Admin’ was missing from the list.

The 6 roles are:

1. Super Admin
   This role differs from the Administrator only in a multisite network environment. In single site WordPress installation, Administrators are in fact Super Admins. This is why you’ve only seen 5 roles in the list.
   
   
2. Administrator
   Administrators have full access to all features within a single site. They can install/ update/ delete plugins and themes, edit files, add/ edit/ delete users in addition to everything other roles can do.
   

3. Editor
   Editors can publish and manage posts and pages including the posts of other users. They can also create/ edit/ delete reusable blocks in the Gutenberg editor, manage categories and moderate comments.
   
   
4. Author 
   Authors can publish, edit and delete their own posts. They can create new reusable blocks but edit and delete only their own blocks.
   
   
5. Contributor
   Contributors can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them.
   
   
6. Subscriber
   Subscribers can only manage their profile and read the content. The subscriber role is useful if you require users to login before they can read a post or leave a comment.
   
   

In conclusion…

I want to remind you how important it is for someone who is just starting his or her online business to learn all the requirements on making your website visible for the Internet users, which is basically the same as making it visible for the search engines. Search engines act in users’ favor and their search algorithm becomes more and more advanced and complicated in order to bring more relevant results for the searches users make. 

In this Guide for Beginners to Earning Money Online, I showed you how many aspects are being considered by the search engines and how closely they are reflecting users’ interests. Showing yourself as a real person plays a big part in earning trust from your readers. However, that’s not enough.

In my two most recent posts
How To Check Website Security and
Find Out Who Owns Website And Check Website Safety,
I’ve explained in more detail what users should look for when deciding whether a website is trustworthy or not, and what website owners should consider and implement in order to earn their visitors’ trust. 

In this guide, I’ve introduced to you the fundamentals of SEO, but I haven’t even explained yet the ways of earning money online. Why? Because in order to earn money, you need a website with traffic. In order to get free traffic from the search engines, you need to understand how Google, Bing, and Yahoo rank your content, and what you should do to increase this ranking.

My next and last post within this Guide will be focused on monetizing your website. But do you believe it’s possible to teach someone how to earn money in one post? No, I will only be able to give you an overview and explain the main ideas.

There are so many things to consider and so many techniques to learn that the best life-changing decision you could make today is to join Wealthy Affiliate platform if you haven’t done so yet, and take lessons created by the owners, who are experts in affiliate marketing, and by many other experts in the WA community.

If you join, the one thing that will be off your shoulders for sure is website security – Wealthy Affiliate offers excellent web hosting! 

Make sure that you join through my page, the page that has my Name, my Welcome message and my Gravatar on it.

Then, I will personally welcome you inside Wealthy Affiliate, you’ll get my one-on-one support and mentorship, and I’ll give you 3 bonuses:

1. 59% off of your first-month Premium membership if you upgrade within your first week at WA.
2. A complete checklist of what you need to remember BEFORE and AFTER you press that “Publish” button in WordPress in order to get your content to rank.
3. The cool tools that help you beautify your website design and make it more fun and unique.
   

Join for FREE today, and take time to look around the platform and get to know our awesome WAmily before you make your life-changing decision to upgrade to Premium! 

Please use the “Comments” area below to ask any questions you may have or give us your feedback.

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