User Roles are a way to differentiate people accessing your website. You as the site own will typically be an Super Administrator, but there are other roles for Admins, Editors, Authors, Contributors and Subscribers (you can learn more about managing your WordPress user roles in our guide). Permissions are security settings that are assigned to User Roles (technically there is a second developer related definition, but for the purposes of this glossary we’re going to skip it). For example, a Super Admin has permission to access any part of your WordPress site, they can install themes or plugins and they can publish, edit or delete content that anyone has created. An author on the other hand typically can only create and publish posts as well as edit content that they’ve created.