When a WordPress website is developed, there are two levels of administrative access that your developer gains. Additionally, they may sometimes continue to have access even after their work is performed. Now, this is ok if your developer is providing you with management and maintenance services for your website. However, if you no longer need their web development services, or if a conflict causes you to part ways, you should know how to remove them permanently. Now let’s show you how to remove a user or administrator from your WordPress website.
In this article we’re going to walk you through how to remove a user or Administrator from your WordPress website. If the user is an administrator like your web developer, then you too must have administrative access. Make sure of this before you part ways with your developer.
Keep in mind that this does not stop your developer from accessing the website through other means. Such as your cPanel and FTP, which tend to be more robust and can give access to break or shut everything down permanently. You do want to protect yourself from these other methods and we will soon publish another article on how to prohibit this as well.
Now let’s get started!
Removing a User Through Your Administrative Panel
This segment will cover removing a user from your WordPress website through your administrative panel. This will cover every user, so long as your account has administrative access. We’ll keep it simple and go from the start.
First, login to your admin panel, where you should be redirected to your “dashboard”. On the left hand-side you’ll see menu options, one of which is called “users”. You may need to scroll down a little for this. Once you’re in the users page, you should see a list of accounts that have access to use functions and features.
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You can look through these accounts, or you can simply do a search for the web developer administrator you’re looking for. You can also, search for any other user, whether they have admin access or not. In order to search, go to the search bar on the right hand-side of this page. Use the input and add their username.
You should be able to locate it just above the list of users on the page. If the user exist in the list, you should be able to see that user and maybe a few others with names that closely match your search criteria. It doesn’t matter if they’re subscribers, authors or administrators, their “role” will be displayed on the right hand-side. You want to use the checkbox on the left hand-side to select the user.
Once the user is selected, go to the dropdown menu above labelled “Bulk Actions”. This will allow you to do what you want no matter how many users you select at once. When you select the down arrow on the right, you will see an option to “Delete” the user.
Select the “Delete” option and select the option to the right labeled “Apply”. At this point, the system will automatically refresh and the user will be delete. However, this does not stop that email address for your Web Developer or users from having full access or from accessing your system notifications. Notification are sent through email. As the one who created the WordPress website, they still have their email address linked to the notifications.
Now, let’s get started on the next steps to remove them completely.
Removing Administration Email Address
This one will be rather quick. We’re going to focus on how to remove the user administrator from your WordPress website’s admin email. The first step is to go to your settings menu option on the left hand-side. We previously showed you this menu, however, below is another image of the menu option you’re looking for. You want to make sure you’re on the “General” menu option.
In the “General” menu options, you will see “Administration Email Address” right after “Site Address (URL)”. The email you add to this input will need to be verified as you would in any other online web platform or application. Add your new email address that will remove your old web developer’s administration email address.
You will receive an email confirmation that you must verify by visiting your email address and selecting the link provided. This will signal to the WordPress application that you have successfully confirmed the new email address. When you visit this page again or refresh if you’re already on the page, you should notice that your new email address has successfully replaced the old admin address.
At this point your have successfully removed the original user or administrator for your website from the top two segments needed. Without this second step, your web developer may be removed, but the notifications and information coming from your website will not stop. They can still see what info is coming through, such as if someone subscribes to your website or if you create a new user.
In the end, you really want to remove them from all user access and all transmitted information. The next two steps is to remove them from your cPanel and erase their FTP account. You can then create a new FTP account or change the password to the FTP account that they were previously using.
