If you are a website administrator, part of your responsibility may involve maintaining the users for your WordPress site. It is good housekeeping as well as proper security practice to remove users that no longer need access to your website. For example, if a user leaves your agency, you must remove their user account from the website and not pass on their credentials to his/her successor. At that point, a new user account should be created for the new user.
Removing a user is fairly simple. To do so you must have admin privileges.
To remove a user from a single site install:
- Navigate to the administrative end and go to Users You will see a list of users on your site.
- Hover over the user’s name and a delete link will appear.
- Click on delete.
- You will then be asked to attribute existing content owned by the user to another user of the website. Select the user you want to pass ownership of existing content and confirm the deletion.
To remove a user from a multisite install:
- Navigate to the administrative end and go to Users and you will see a list of users on your site.
- Hover over the user’s name and a remove link will appear.
- Click on remove.
The concept is slightly different from a single site install because in a multisite install the user doesn’t actually get deleted. This is because in a multisite setup a user account can be used across multiple sites within the network. When you remove a user from one site on the network, the user will remain at the network level. To delete a user completely from the network, a user with super admin priviledges needs to delete the user account from the network level.