How to Create Temporary Login for WordPress without Password?
Preserving User roles is an important thing to do if website security is a concern for you as a WordPress website owner. Being able to control what other users on your website can modify or create can be quite important. Through the use of roles, you can choose who can moderate, create, edit, delete content as well as manipulate website elements.
However, at times you might have to provide administrator rights or full access to people on your website that might not be involved with your content at all. These people might be WordPress professionals hired for maintenance or more.
Usually, the process involved here is to simply make a login credential for these users and deleting them once it is done. But we can use the concept of Temporary logins as well. So let’s take a look at the advantages of using Temporary logins and the process required to implement in WordPress without the use of passwords.
Why should we enable Temporary access
At times you might face issues on WordPress that you simply can’t fix. In these circumstances, you might look to hire professionals or take help from more experienced personnel to fix these issues. These professionals will require full access to your website. Providing these credentials to someone else over the Internet might be quite risky.
Similarly, you might look to create a self-sustaining website where users can post their own articles and edit them accordingly without an admin intervention. Rather than providing all users with the roles required to post, you can simply create Temporary logins to allow these users to create or upload content on your website. Thus you can create a pseudo guest blogger/editor role on your website which is much safer.
Enabling Temporary Login
For creating Temporary access for users, we recommend you use plugins created for this purpose. Some of these we recommend are:
Temporary Login Without Password
This plugin lets you easily make user credentials for various roles with limited access time. You can easily use the dashboard to edit these user accounts as well. The dashboard lets you delete, edit, and create accounts promptly.
The plugin provides a link which users can use to access their accounts. This means that they don’t need to insert a password or their credentials to use their accounts. All we simply need is an email and a username.
Key features:
- Easy to use
- Provides easy to share login link
- Let’s you limit user access through roles, account usage time and more
- Easy to use and understand interface and dashboard
Controlled admin access:
This is another dedicated temporary login made for temporary logins. However, unlike the plugin above, we create a completely new user ID with passwords. The plugin also lets you limit what the user can access specifically. This means instead of assigning user roles such as administrators, editors or posters, you can manipulate what pages of your WP admin the user can access or edit.
The plugin lets you block/allow access to different elements of your website such as comments, plugins, appearance, products, WooCommerce and more. This means you can create specific temporary roles such as theme designers, post editors and more.
Key features:
- Lets you specify what the users can access
- Easy to use
- Set up passwords with expiration times.
Advanced access manager
Instead of a direct solution to Temporary logins, this plugin is an entire package created for user access control. While you can create temporary logins with this plugin, the provision also provides other tools to control your WordPress admin panels such as role management and role access, backend lockdown, user account authentication, login/logout redirects and more.
Key features:
- Role management and access specification features
- User access tools
- A large number of options to solve virtually every user access related issue
These plugins are all viable options however for demonstration’s sake we’ll be using Temporary login without password plugin as it is much easier to setup and allows us to complete our objective: Providing temporary logins without the need of setting up a password.
Using the plugin
First of all go ahead and install the plugin first. If you are not sure how to, consider reading this article.
Once you activate the plugin, use the wp-admin dashboard to open the Temporary login plugin’s panel. Simply hover over Users and click on Temporary login.
Once you open the panel, we can go ahead and create a new temporary user by clicking on Create New.
Now, we need to insert the required data. The fields you need to cover are:
- Email: Insert the required Email id here. Important messages links regarding the website as well as login links will be sent through an email to this ID.
- First name/Last name: Here we insert the name of the user account we are creating.
- Role: Select what user role the user account will have. This defines how much access the account has on your website.
- Expiry: The expiration date the account will have. This can be changed from a few hours to a year and more.
Once you insert entire all the required data in the required fields, click on Submit and the user account will be made.
Then a list of users created will be shown. On the right side, we can see 5 icons. Each icon exists for a separate purpose.
- Lock/ Disable button: This lets you instantly deactivate an account. Clicking the same icon on a disabled account enables it for the span of 24 hours.
- X/ Delete button: This button lets you delete the account.
- Edit button: You can use this option to edit the account’s name, expiration time and roles.
- Email login button: This button lets you easily send an email consisting of the login link.
- Link button: Copies the account’s login link to the clipboard. Then you can simply paste the link to provide the login access to anyone you want.
Providing the Login link:
Now if you want to provide the login link to an individual, you can simply use the mail button to send a mail with the link to the required email.
OR you can use the link button to copy the link. Then you can either simply directly message the recipient, paste the link on your website or more. The choice remains yours.
Concluding
Thus using these plugins you can create Temporary accounts for WordPress. A great suggestion is to monitor the changes done by these accounts in order to track what the user has been up to using these account’s access. For this, we suggest using the plugin: WP Audit log.
The plugin records all actions done by users regarding website changes and monitors them. When a change is made, the plugin records the change down, date, the user account that performed the change as well as the source IP that accessed the panel. This is extremely helpful to know which users performed what actions and monitor your temporary accounts closely.
With these plugins and the WP audit log, you can easily enable a Temporary login system on your website and ensure your website is secured at the same time. To learn about other measures you can do to secure your website, we recommend you check out these articles:
