How to Manage and Control User Sessions on WordPress
Last updated on September 15th, 2023 at 01:43 pm
At least for once, you must have thought about who uses your WordPress site and what they do while they are logged in. Some are curious to know about users logged into the front-end of the site while some want to know what backend users are at up to in the WordPress admin.
As of now, WordPress is not capable enough to track down the user’s activity session and it also doesn’t provide you with the option to take control of those activities or user sessions. Therefore, whether you want to control frontend or backend user session you will require a user session control plugin. Here we are explaining a few of the options available for effective management of user sessions in WordPress.
For Backend User Session Management and Control
Two means influence a WordPress site first is from the backend and another one is from the frontend. Let’s first understand how one can monitor and manage backend user sessions effectively:
WordPress Builders or designers, Quality Analyst, Bloggers, Multisite Admins, Client Side users, and SEO Professionals are the general backend users for whom you want to know who logged in when for what duration they logged in, and what while they logged in to your WordPress site. To keep track of all this you can simply automate the process using a WordPress plugin or by using a third-party extension it will give you the control to block or adjust the access if you feel that users are abusing the access privileges granted by you and it is harming your website be it was done intentionally or unintentionally by the user.
This is also an effective means to keep an eye on who is contributing how much to the site’s growth for example you have hired an SEO Specialist to work on SEO improvements on the site, you can easily figure out if any work is done or not in that direction by tracking recent logins and take further action upon it.
We have mentioned a few tools that will help you gather information about users and exert control over them for managing user sessions:
It is a security plugin that allows you to control user sessions and provides you with deeper insights without making you pay even a single buck for accessing it. This is a great plugin for blocking security threats immediately. You can set the login lockdown process after failed attempts, and can also track the IP address and username for all lockouts, it has a force lockout feature if the user exceeds the permissible time limit for using the WordPress site, Monitors the site when users are logged in and provide an option for force log out if something wrong is suspected, It can also view login and logout date and time of all its users.
This is the best plugin for simple user session monitoring and managing in WordPress. It adds up a new tab called “Sessions” in the Users menu of a WordPress site and enables you to see the list of all registered users of the website with their Username, Name, Email ID, Role, Last login, and Logout time, IP Address. Through this plugin, you can easily block the user if you suspect any security breach or hacking by withdrawing access by an option present as “Destroy Session.”
Through this plugin, you can audit the logs of the user within WordPress. This also provides you with an option to create automatic reports that send these logs directly into your inbox. It gives you information about who logged in to WordPress, what activities they did while logged in, and what they did on the backend. This is the best plugin present for monitoring hackers and enables you to see the record of user activities and lets you quickly escalate the issues in the case when something wrong is suspected.
For Frontend User Session Management and Control
Let’s move ahead and discuss further managing the frontend user session of the WordPress website. Frontend users refer to those who have direct access to a user account via domain. They could be blog subscribers, commenters, registered users, or customers. By giving them access generally, site owners try to give them a better user experience as they can personalize or modify it as per their needs and preferences.
For security reasons, a site owner would want to monitor the front-end user’s activities. It is also done to make sure that any bots or hacker is not using a valid user account for breaking or damaging your site. Studying the current trends and prevailing user behavior is another reason for frontend user session control this owner can create a better platform to fit the user’s needs.
A tool for controlling frontend user sessions in WordPress is mentioned below:
This is a premium WordPress plugin designed to give you accurate insights into front-end users. So, if you run a bbPress forum, a WooCommerce store, a paid membership website, etc. anything that requires heavy account usage and user registration then you can blindly trust this plugin.
This plugin is more sort of providing you user insights to learn and improve user experience rather than focussing more on blocking fake accounts and unsafe activities. A few features offered by this plugin for controlling user sessions effectively are you get real-time data on what users are buying, and exploring and with whom they are interacting. It organizes user groups upon their demographic features, access permissions, behavior, etc. It also tracks the user login and last login details. It also enables owners to get data on how many purchases are made, and how frequently they comment through a single account to ensure correct decisions are being made to increase user experience.
Final Thoughts
Make sure as an owner you keep an eye on how user session management and control is affecting your site’s performance and if there is heavy traffic on your WordPress site and your server is not capable enough to hold extra resources for requests made then you surely will need above-mentioned plugins for better management of user sessions.
