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

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:

• Customize the WordPress registration form and create a SEO-friendly front-end registration page.
• Customize the registration process, like collecting more information from users or automatically redirecting them to a custom page after they register.
• Restrict access to content, which can eliminate the need for membership plugins in some situations.

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:

• The Admin Approval feature lets you hold new user registrations for manual approval in the WordPress admin dashboard. You can either hold all registrations or only certain WordPress user roles.
• The Admin Email Customizer add-on from Profile Builder PRO lets you approve new WordPress users by clicking a link in an email, rather than needing to use the WordPress dashboard.

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.

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.

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

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

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 Add-on

Next, under the Profile Builder menu, go to Add-Ons and make sure to activate the Email Customizer add-on. This will allow you to customize the email an admin receives on a new registration and add the approval link to it.

3. Insert the Approve User Link in the Admin Email

Next, go to Profile Builder → Settings and select the Email Customizer tab. Then, click on Administrator Emails to customize the emails that get sent to site administrators.

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:

After inserting the tags in the email content, make sure to click “Save settings” 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.

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 both Admin Approval and Email Customizer add-ons, available in the premium version of Profile Builder.

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