How to Create a Temporary Login Without Password in WordPress

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As a WordPress site owner, you can easily add or remove a user. But if you hire a developer to build your website or customize anything, you may need to provide your administrator login details to the developer. That’s not a good option to give your admin login details and as a result, he/ she will end up by messing up your site.

But there is a good way to handle it. You can create a temporary login or give temporary admin access to the user without password. And the most important thing is that you can even edit the temporary admin’s capabilities. So that you can be sure which options the user can access or not.

Why Do You need to Create a Temporary Login Without Password?

It’s a good idea to use a premium theme or plugin because premium stuff comes with more helpful features, constantly updated and most of all you can get email support if you are getting any problem.

So, if you have bought a premium theme or plugin and you are getting an error or want to edit something, you need to reach out to your plugin developer. If it is a common issue, then the developer probably suggest you to apply some codes in it. If the problem still occurs, your developer will ask you to access your site to fix the issue from their end and for this, you need to provide your admin login access.

You may not want to provide your admin login access to someone you don’t know, on the other hand, you also want to fix that problem. It becomes very complex decision to provide your admin access to an unknown person.

Fortunately, you can create a temporary login or admin access on your WordPress site. In this case, the user doesn’t require a password for login into your site and the login will be temporary.

This is the very useful method if you want to give your admin login access to your developer or accept guest posts.

This method works fine for guest bloggers as you are not giving them your admin login details. But when you are giving your admin login details to your developer for fixing or developing something, it becomes quite risky, as they might mess up with your site, change your site’s link or can delete any important thing.

In this case, you need to create:

A new user role
A temporary login access

It’s very easy process and in this article, I will show you how to create a temporary login access with no password and that user will have very limited access. For example, if your developer wants to fix your plugin issue, then you can provide the specific access so that other functions will be restricted.

How to Create a Temporary Login Without Password in WordPress

Here, I will use two plugins- User Role Editor and Temporary Login Without Password.

These two plugins are necessary if you want to provide your admin login access to someone. For accepting guest posts, you don’t need User Role Editor plugin unless you want to add or customize WordPress’s user roles.

Step 1, Create a Secondary Administrator Account

There are many user role editor plugin available and here I will use User Role Editor plugin. First, install and activate this plugin. Then go to Users> User Role Editor and from there click on Add Role, for example, “Temp Admin“. You can also make a copy of any existing user role.

After adding new user role, click on Update button to store the settings.

Once you have created a new user role, now it’s time to add or remove capabilities. From the Select Role and Change its Capabilities option, select the user role that you have just created.

Now, add capabilities as you want, for example, if the user wants to edit your theme file, then you can give capabilities from the theme section. But keep in mind you need to give general admin privileges so that the user can access your site.

Once you finished adding capabilities, click on Update button to save the changes.

Step 2, Create a Temporary User Account

In this step, you need to install Temporary Login Without Password plugin. After activating this plugin, go to Users> Temporary Logins.

There you have to fill all the details of the new temporary user. But be careful when choosing a User role. Next, set an expiry date of the temporary login. After the time, the account will be automatically expired.

Now, click on Submit button to create the user.

You will see a message that the user has been created successfully. Now Click to Copy the temporary login link and share it with anyone. This way users can directly login to your WordPress admin panel without username and password. You can also email this link directly if you want.

This is a temporary admin access and anyone can log in by using this link. I also recommend you to test the login link before sending to anyone. Because, if the developer can’t access your admin panel, you need to fix it again and it will take a lot of time. So test it carefully.

How to Manage or Delete a Temporary Login

After the work is done, you may want to expire or delete that temporary account. For this, visit the Users> Temporary Logins page.

From that page, you can see user’s names, emails, roles, last logged in, expiry date. You can also edit, expire or delete a user. In case you want to extend the expiry date or change a user’s role, you can do it easily.

If you delete a user’s account, all the contents created by the user like posts, pages will be shown as administrator.

That’s it. This way you can create a temporary login or create a user without password on your WordPress site. If you like this tutorial, share it with your friends. If you are having an issue with it, do let us know in the comment section.