Securing your WordPress website isn’t just about having strong passwords or regular updates – it’s about implementing comprehensive access control measures.
At Servebolt, we’ve seen countless security incidents that could have been prevented through proper access management.
If you’re working with a team, you’ll need to grant access to team members, but this simple action can leave your website vulnerable to attacks if done incorrectly.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the essential practices and strategies that must be implemented to protect your WordPress environment. From meticulously managing user access and permissions to establishing robust monitoring, you’ll discover a multilayered approach to WordPress security that will help you protect your site.
Let’s explore why access control matters and how to implement it effectively.
Here’s Why Access Control Matters
If you are building your website with a team, you’ll need to grant several team members access to your servers and WordPress dashboard. Access control is your first line of defense against unauthorized users, data breaches, and internal security incidents.
Properly implementing access control allows you to:
- Determine who gets in
- Specify what they can do once inside
- Keep detailed records of their activities
Without proper access control – particularly with bad practices like account sharing – you’re essentially leaving open access to your site.
The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP)
The Principle Of Least Privilege (POLP) is a fundamental security concept that should guide your access control strategy. This principle states that users should only have access to the resources they need to perform their specific job functions – nothing more, nothing less.
For example:
- Content writers don’t need access to plugin installation capabilities
- Social media managers don’t need access to theme customization
- SEO specialists don’t need administrative privileges
It’s important to note that this is not about trust. You should be able to trust anyone you invite to your WordPress dashboard not to do anything they shouldn’t. But using the principle of least privilege as a guiding principle reduces your attack surface, and minimizes the potential damage if an account is compromised.
If you are serious about your website’s security, we recommend reading our post on WordPress security plugins to learn which security plugin is best for your WordPress site.
WordPress Team Access Best Practices
If you are a WordPress administrator, these are some best practices that you can follow to protect your website:
Take Advantage of Role-Based Access Control in WordPress Core
Role-based access control (RBAC) provides a structured approach to managing user permissions. Each level has a hierarchy of specific responsibilities and corresponding access rights.

The Administrator role is the most powerful role in the WordPress ecosystem. It should be reserved exclusively for technical leads and site owners who require full system access. This role should be granted sparingly – typically to no more than 2-3 trusted individuals in your organization. These users can install plugins, modify core files, and make system-wide changes that could potentially impact site security and stability.
The Editor role is suitable for your content leadership team. This role is equipped with the authority to manage and publish all content while being restricted from making technical changes. It’s perfect for content managers and editorial leads who need to oversee the entire content operation without requiring access to technical configurations. Editors can manage categories, moderate comments, and oversee the work of Authors and Contributors.
The Author role has some creative freedom but also security constraints. Authors can create, edit, and publish their own content, making this role ideal for regular content contributors and staff writers. Authors can upload media files and manage their own content but cannot modify content created by others, maintaining clear content ownership and accountability.
Contributors are entry-level content creators, and this role is perfect for guest writers or probationary team members. They can write and edit their own posts but cannot publish them directly or upload media files. This limitation provides an important quality control checkpoint, ensuring all content goes through a proper editorial review before going live.
The Subscriber role has limited capabilities but plays a crucial role in community engagement. These users can manage their own profiles and access protected content, making this role perfect for community members, customers, or newsletter subscribers.
Regular Access Audits
Regular access audits keep track of system resources and protect against unauthorized access and potential security breaches. By implementing a recurring review schedule, you can ensure your user base remains current and secure. During these audits, you should examine each user account and verify that active accounts correspond to current team members and that their permission levels align with their current responsibilities.
If you encounter dormant accounts, you should remove them from your organization. These dormant accounts often represent significant security vulnerabilities. Alternatively, you can establish an automated system to flag accounts that haven’t been accessed within a specified timeframe (typically 60-90 days) for review. When team members change roles or leave the organization, their access should be modified or revoked immediately through a documented offboarding process.
Additionally, you should keep a log when permissions of a user account change. This can help you in multiple situations, such as compliance requirements, security audits, and operational transparency. When you create a log, it should include:
- Date and time of access changes
- Nature of the modification
- Reason for the change
- Authorizing personnel
- Implementation verification
- Previous and new access levels
At Servebolt, we provide advanced access controls and detailed audit logs to manage and track system changes. Learn more about access management on Servebolt.
Monitoring and Maintenance
We cannot stress enough the importance of regular monitoring and assessment when maintaining secure access control in your WordPress environment. Access management is an ongoing process that requires vigilance, continuous improvement, and a proactive security mindset.

You should implement a comprehensive monitoring strategy that includes automated security scans to continuously monitor for unauthorized access, suspicious activity, and potential vulnerabilities.
Additionally, conduct monthly tests of your access control measures to ensure they are functioning as intended, and update your policies and procedures based on the findings of these security assessments. If you want a good activity monitoring and tracking plugin for your WordPress site, we recommend reading this post on the best WordPress activity log plugins.
Perform an Offsite Backup
Even with the most trusted team, human error is always a possibility. A robust backup strategy is essential for team environments where multiple users have site access. Before you provide access to new team members, you should take a snapshot of your entire WordPress installation, including:
- Database content
- Media files
- Themes and plugins
- Configuration files
- Custom code modifications
You should store backups in multiple secure locations, with at least one off-site copy. While many excellent backup plugins and services are available, the key is choosing a solution that provides:
- Automated scheduling
- Incremental backups
- Secure storage options
- Easy restoration processes
If you are using Servebolt to host your websites, you can simply take advantage of Servebolt’s built-in backup functionality. However, if you are not using Servebolt (yet), then finding a good backup solution that ticks all the boxes can be hard. Fortunately, the security experts at Patchstack have compiled a list of the best WordPress backup plugins and services based on security.
Secure User Access Management for WordPress
So far, we have covered several best practices and tips for granting access to your WordPress website. Now, let’s see how to put these into practice.
Safely Granting New User Access
Following a structured onboarding process is essential to maintain security when bringing new team members into your WordPress environment. As described in the previous section, you should start by creating individual accounts with carefully configured roles based on the Principle of Least Privilege.
We recommend that you never modify existing accounts or share credentials. Instead, establish a documented process for account creation that includes:
- Mandatory security training
- Written acceptance of security policies
- Scheduled access reviews
If you are using Servebolt to host your websites, it is easy. Servebolt provides built-in functionality to share your server resources with other team members, making it easy for developers to modify or update existing infrastructure as needed.

Prevent Account Sharing
Sharing accounts is like sharing house keys – it eliminates accountability and creates unnecessary security risks. Even if multiple users have the same permission level, you should still create separate user accounts for each team member. This allows precise tracking of user actions, simplifies access management, and enhances security through individual accountability.
Additionally, when each user has their own account, you can easily implement personalized security measures, track individual activity patterns, and quickly revoke access when needed without stopping others from getting work done.
You can also consider implementing strict login limitations to enforce a ban on account sharing. For example, you can configure your WordPress installation to allow only one active session per user account, preventing multiple people from simultaneously using the same credentials.
Add Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication (2FA) provides an additional security layer for WordPress access, particularly for users with elevated privileges. While implementing 2FA for all WooCommerce customer accounts might be impractical, it should be mandatory for anyone with administrative, editorial, or other sensitive access levels.

Modern 2FA solutions offer various options, from authenticator apps to hardware security keys, allowing you to choose the most appropriate method for your team’s needs. The WordPress plugin contributors team has an official solution available on the repository, and there are also others with more specific use cases and support for hardware security keys for two-factor authentication in WordPress.
Note: In addition to enforcing two-factor authentication on your WordPress installation, we strongly recommend using a hosting provider that also offers two-factor authentication for its admin dashboard, which Servebolt does. Learn more here.
Secure SSH & FTP Access Management
While most WordPress users manage their website via the WordPress dashboard, many advanced users also need access to SSH and FTP. Granting SSH access to your server will allow team members to execute WordPress CLI commands, which grants unrestricted access to the WordPress website.
If your workflow requires you to grant SSH access, then each team member should have their own dedicated access credentials, completely separate from their WordPress login. You should use a robust password manager such as 1Password, which offers specialized features for SSH key management and Git integration. 1Password’s SSH agent functionality provides secure key Storage and seamless integration with development workflows, eliminating the need for manual key management.
If you want to access your server’s file system, use SFTP instead of standard FTP for encrypted file transfers. Additionally, you should create individual accounts for each team member instead of sharing credentials. After creating the accounts, you must share these credentials securely through your password manager’s sharing features. Many people share account credentials in plain text format through email, which is never a good idea.

Read our previous posts on connecting to your bolt via SSH with PuTTY on Servebolt and how to establish a secure SSH connection to manage your bolt’s environments.
If you don’t plan to use this functionality, consider turning off SSH/FTP.
Use Staging Environments
All good WordPress websites should have a staging environment. Creating a staging environment is crucial to maintaining site stability and security, especially when working with a team.
For new team members, start by granting them access only to the staging environment. This allows you to closely monitor their work and impact before fully onboarding them to the production site. A staging environment provides a place where new team members can learn the ropes and experienced developers can safely test changes without putting the live production site at risk.
It’s important to adhere to best practices when implementing your staging environment. First and foremost, ensure that the staging environment is an exact replica of your production environment, down to the last plugin and configuration detail.
You should use separate credentials for the staging and Production environments and implement the same security measures in the staging environment as you do in production, such as access controls, activity logging, and backup procedures.
Grant Temporary Access
Occasionally, you may need to provide in-house or freelance developers with access to your WordPress site to perform maintenance, updates, or other necessary tasks. For such tasks, you can consider granting temporary access to these users.
The primary security concern with temporary access is the possibility of malicious actors exploiting inactive or forgotten credentials. To mitigate this risk, set a clear expiration date for the temporary user account, after which it will be deactivated. If your identity management system does not support automatic expiration, consider setting reminders on your calendar to remove highly sensitive accounts. This ensures that the account cannot be used beyond the intended timeframe, reducing the window of opportunity for potential abuse.
Revoking Access When Team Members Leave
When team members leave your organization, you should revoke access promptly to prevent potential security breaches. Disgruntled employees sometimes try to sabotage business operations after termination; having an access revocation policy in place can protect you in such instances.
We recommend establishing a comprehensive offboarding checklist covering all possible access points. For example, you can consider the following:
- Revoke WordPress admin privileges
- Reset SFTP and SSH credentials
- Disable database access
- Remove hosting panel access
- Disconnect any third-party service accounts
In addition to these access-related tasks, ensure that you change any shared passwords, API keys, or other sensitive credentials to which the departing individual may have access. Document all access removals, review recent activity logs, and update your team access documentation to maintain a clear audit trail.
Implement IP-Based Restrictions
Implementing IP-based access restrictions adds a layer of security to your WordPress environment by limiting administrative access to only known, trusted IP addresses. You should list all approved IP addresses that should be granted access, whether they belong to your office locations, remote team members, or any other authorized parties.
You will also need to establish clear VPN usage requirements for any individuals who need to access your site from untrusted or dynamic IP addresses. If you want to take it one step further, you can configure time-based whitelisting, which only provides access during certain hours of the day. Attackers often try to exploit leaked credentials after office hours, as most people are unavailable. Implementing this time-based access would add another layer of security that the hackers would need to bypass.
Advice – Hire People You Can Trust
Ultimately, no matter how robust your technical security measures may be, the security of your WordPress environment lies in the hands of the people you trust with access to your website.
You need systems and processes to vet people properly, check references, and verify an official form of ID. Various solutions, including HR and payroll platforms like Remote and Deel, make this easy.

This may seem like basic advice, but we have unfortunately seen some sizable companies make these mistakes. Simply put:
- Conduct thorough background checks
- Verify references and samples in the applicant’s portfolio
- Verify an official form of ID using a provider that handles this for you
- If you decide to move forward, grant access in stages – during their trial period, perhaps only grant access to staging environments until you feel comfortable that you know the person you’re working with.
This is a practice commonly referred to as The Trust Battery:
“It’s something that actually exists, but is rarely documented. People think trust is almost an on/off kind of thing. Like, I trust my mother, I don’t trust the NSA. But, it’s really a gradient. It’s really something with a lot of different points on this particular spectrum, right? If people meet each other, especially in a curated context like a company, like both of us start working here, and we both got hired, so we both ran through the gauntlet of how to be hired here, so that means we probably will trust each other, let’s say, 50% right off the bat. Then we have these interactions, we have a meeting like the one we just talked about, the combatant idea, or we just talk about an idea, we come up with something even better, we work well together. This slowly charges, right? I think it’s useful to have this metaphor between people because it allows you to sort of talk about the trust that exists between two people without actually becoming personal. So much about working in teams is the way you communicate working together, the way you give each other feedback.” – Tobi Lütke (Shopify founder and CEO)
After Action Report – Design A Secure WordPress Environment For Your Team
Access control and team management play fundamental roles in securing your site. We hope you start adopting the practices, processes, and principles we’ve shared in the guide – perhaps gradually to make it easier for everyone on your team to get up to speed.
Any questions about keeping your WordPress sites secure?
Although security is never done, it doesn’t need to be a headache.
A major first step for most is finding a strong web hosting company that takes security seriously. In short, having a security plugin isn’t enough; you also need a secure and reliable hosting provider – this is where Servebolt comes in.
Servebolt Cloud isn’t just another hosting provider – we’ve engineered our infrastructure from the ground up for unparalleled speed and reliability. Servebolt’s proprietary Linux distribution uses a highly optimized Linux kernel that minimizes resource usage and maximizes performance.
But it’s not just about speed. We provide unheard-of database performance and unlimited PHP workers. This is backed by a 100% network and power uptime commitment and an A+ rated security implementation.
Are you intrigued? We’d love to show you how Servebolt Cloud can transform your online presence. Start using Servebolt today.
And, to complement Servebolt’s first-class hosting experience, Patchstack offers a comprehensive suite of security tools and services specifically tailored to WordPress. As soon as you connect your site to Patchstack, you’ll receive notifications about vulnerabilities 48 hours before they’re publicly disclosed.