Why do so many users are registering on my wordpress site?

If you have a wordpress site and have allowed anyone to register on your site then chances are that you will get 5-10 users registering on your site everyday. Don't get carried away its not about popularity of your blog that's driving so many user registrations, the real reason is 99.99% of the times these are spam accounts who are trying to explore security vulnerabilities in your website to hack it and post spam content on your site.



Wordpress allows users with various roles to be your website users like Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor and Admin. I will explain each role in greater depth in an article to come soon. These spam users try to explore mistakes of site admins who accidentally keep the site open to allow users to register as any role other than subscribers.  If they detect this security vulnerability it will become very difficult for you to manage your site and these users will take over your site and start posting junk spam content on your website which will tarnish your site reputation and keep away good readers from visiting your site.

What to do if you have these user registrations?

1. You can go to your site admin panel i.e control panel a.k.a cpanel.


2. Go to users and select all the users with role as Subscribers.


3. Check if there are any users with other roles as well which you never wanted.


4. Then select all and delete them.


5. When you are deleting you will ge an option to delete their content or transfer the content ownership on your name.


6. If these users have posted content then simply use the delete content option to be safer.


7. Make sure you do not delete your own account as you will loose access to your account and your website will be blocked.

How to prevent these users from registering on your site?

1. Again go to the cpanel


2. Setting > Membership


3. Uncheck the box near membership which says "Anyone can register".

Disabling membership access to general public does not mean you will never be able to add new trusted members to your website as Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor or Admin so the below question arises.

How do I add trusted members to my site?

1. Go to cPanel


2. Select Users option


3. Select Users Add New from top corner.

Hope these tips will help you manage your website the way you want to and avoid any situation where your website is exposed to security vulnerability. Be safe and keep blogging quality content.

Cheers!!