How to Approve New WordPress Users (From Dashboard or Via Email)

Approve New WordPress Users
Adrian Spiac
Last Updated: 22/01/24

If you allow public registration at your site, you probably want to manually approve new WordPress users before you start letting them use your site. This helps you cut down on spammers or just otherwise weed out users who shouldn’t be there.

In this post, we’re going to show you two ways to set up WordPress approve new users functionality on your site:

  1. You’ll be able to approve new WordPress users from the WordPress dashboard.
  2. If you’re on the go, you can receive admin email notifications for new user sign-ups and approve new WordPress users by clicking a link in the email that you receive.

By combining these two methods, you’ll be able to quickly approve new WordPress user accounts whether you’re on your computer or on the go.

What You Need to Set Up WordPress Approve New Users Functionality

To set up WordPress approve new users functionality, you can use two features in the Profile Builder WordPress plugin.

Profile Builder is a complete WordPress user registration solution. It can help you:

And, of course, it also works great as a WordPress new user approve plugin thanks to the features that we’ll detail below.

To use Profile Builder to cut down on spam user registrations, you can take advantage of two WordPress approve new users features:

In addition to working with the core WordPress registration functionality, Profile Builder also integrates with other plugins, like WooCommerce and BuddyPress, and it’s also compatible with WordPress multisite.

Profile Builder Pro

Create beautiful front-end registration and profile forms with custom fields. Setup member directories, custom redirects, cutomize user emails & more using the all in one user management plugin.

Get Profile Builder

Here’s how it works…

How to Set Up New User Admin Approval in the WordPress Dashboard

To activate WordPress user approval from the wp-admin dashboard, you can go to Profile Builder → Settings and turn the Admin Approval feature on from the General Settings tab.

Once you turn on the WordPress approve new users feature, you’ll further be able to select which WordPress user roles require manual approval:

Admin approval settings

Once you activate Admin Approval, a site admin can go to UsersAll UsersAdmin Approval to approve new users. You can also bulk approve users to save time:

Profile Builder - Admin Approval Backend

While this approach works perfectly fine, it can be pretty time-consuming to do over and over again, especially if you’re dealing with a significant number of new user registrations on a daily basis.

How to set up the WordPress approve new users from email notification feature

A more efficient approach, that will save time is to be able to approve new users directly from the notification email that WordPress sends to admin users when someone registers.

Instead of needing to open the full WordPress dashboard, you can just click a link in the email to approve the user.

You can set up admin approval via email in three steps.

1. Enable Admin Approval

To get started, make sure that you’ve enabled the basic Admin Approval feature by following the steps above.

2. Activate Admin Email Customizer

Next, under Profile BuilderSettings, go to the Email Customizer tab. This will allow you to customize the email an admin receives on a new registration and add the approval link to it.

Email customizer settings

3. Insert the Approve User Link in the Admin Email

Then, click on Administrator Emails to customize the emails that get sent to site administrators.

Edit admin emails

Then, scroll down to the Registration with Admin Approval email box. You can then use the Available Tags box to include the links to automatically approve and/or unapprove the user. You can either insert the link or you can use the tag to just insert the URL, which would let you create your own link.

You should also make sure that the email is enabled:

Set up WordPress approve new users email

After inserting the tags in the email content, make sure to click Save Changes and you’re done.

Now, every time a new user registers the admin will receive the notification email containing the approval link, which you can see in the screenshot below:

Once clicked, the admin will see if the operation has been successful. If so, the new user will be approved, notified and able to log in to your WordPress website.

WordPress approve new users success message

Profile Builder Makes it Easy to Approve New WordPress Users

With Profile Builder, you can easily set up WordPress approve new users functionality to cut down on spam user registrations and other unwanted users, without needing to dig into your site’s PHP code.

What’s more, you get two methods to approve new users:

  • From the WordPress admin dashboard;
  • By clicking a link in an email that gets sent to admins.

While you can test out the free version of Profile Builder at WordPress.org, to approve users from admin email you’ll need the Admin Approval feature, available in the premium version of Profile Builder.

Profile Builder Pro

Create beautiful front-end registration and profile forms with custom fields. Setup member directories, custom redirects, cutomize user emails & more using the all in one user management plugin.

Get Profile Builder

5 thoughts on “How to Approve New WordPress Users (From Dashboard or Via Email)

    nice and handy! How do you think saving logging in etc weighs up against the possible security impacts?

    Reply

    Hi,

    Where can I define to what email address the admin approval mails are being send?(so configure the admin email)

    Kind Regards,
    Tom

    Reply

    Hello Tom,

    This can be done by going to your Dashboard -> Settings -> General and modify the Admin Email Address.

    Regards.

    Reply

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