Our thinking

How We Organized WordPress Roles and Capabilities

10 January 2018

I was looking for an easy way to see which capabilities each of the WordPress roles have, but I couldn’t find it, so I’ve put this together.

I’ve grouped similar capabilities together, so it’s easy to see that, for instance: an Administrator can manage plugins, or an Editor can manage and publish pages.

The groupings are my own, but the capability names come straight from the WordPress codex (although I’ve converted them from machine-readable to human-readable format).

User role Group of capabilities Individual capabilities
Subscriber and up Read Read
Contributor and up
Create draft posts
Edit posts
Delete posts
Author and up
Manage & Publish own posts
Publish posts
Edit published posts
Delete published posts
Upload files
Editor and up
Manage & Publish others’ posts
Delete others’ posts
Edit others’ posts
Manage & Publish pages
Delete others’ pages
Delete pages
Delete published pages
Edit others’ pages
Edit pages
Edit published pages
Publish pages
Manage & Read private posts and pages
Delete private pages
Delete private posts
Edit private pages
Edit private posts
Read private pages
Read private posts
Manage categories and links
Manage categories
Manage links
Moderate comments Moderate comments
Insert unfiltered HTML Unfiltered HTML
Administrator
Manage plugins
Activate plugins
Update plugins
Install plugins
Upload plugins
Delete plugins
Edit plugins
Manage themes
Switch themes
Update themes
Install themes
Upload themes
Delete themes
Edit themes
Manage users
List users
Promote users
Remove users
Edit users
Create users
Delete users
Import and export
Export
Import
Manage widgets, menus, customization
Edit theme options
Customize
Manage settings Manage options
Manage site
Edit dashboard
Delete site
Update core
Edit files

*Note: On multisite installs, some administrator capabilities are only available to Super Admins. I’ve focused this table on single site installs for simplicity. For more info, visit the codex.