Registration pages don’t come up often when people talk about how to improve their WordPress websites, and that’s a mistake. After all, learning how to customize WordPress registration page can benefit you tremendously.
With just a few tweaks, you can collect more information about your users, reinforce your branding, and gather more data for analytics. The best part is that customizing your WordPress registration page using plugins is simple, so you’ll be able to reap these benefits quickly.
In this article, we’ll talk in-depth about why customizing this particular page can be useful, and then we’ll tell you how to do it using two WordPress plugins. Let’s dig in!
Why you should customize WordPress registration page
Most content management systems provide you with some sort of user functionality, which enables users to set up profiles and interact with your content. Registration pages make this possible by saving user information in your database for future access.
While WordPress does offer this functionality, it doesn’t come with too many bells and whistles. In fact, it could be called rather bare-bones. The bright side is that customizing your registration page is easy, and here’s why you should consider doing it:
- You can tweak its style for branding purposes by including your logo, modifying your buttons, and so on.
- A registration page can enable you to collect useful information about your new users, such as their interests or social media profiles, but only if you can include the right questions.
- User information can be put to use for analytic purposes, to gain a better understanding of your core audience.
To make a long story short, customizing your WordPress registration page is a move with very few downsides. It shouldn’t even take you that long if you follow the advice below.
How to customize your WordPress registration page
Since you’ll be dealing with a page that is critical to your site’s proper functioning, it’s important that you back up your WordPress installation before moving forward.
Once you’ve taken care of that, we can get down to business. We’ll be using two different plugins to highlight the different ways you can customize your registration page. You’re free to use either of them depending on what customizations you want to implement. All you have to do is install your pick and configure it according to the instructions below.
Option 1: Ultimate Member (Free)
Ultimate Member packs in plenty of features on top of enabling you to customize the registration page. It also provides you with a way of adding new functions to your user profiles, creating custom user roles, and setting up complex forms.
In short, this plugin takes WordPress’ basic community features and adds a ton of new options on top of them. It also enables you to customize your registration page using a simple drag-and-drop builder, so you can control exactly how your page will look and what elements it will include.
How to get started with Ultimate Member:
Ultimate Member can be a bit intimidating at first, due to its sheer variety of options. However, using this plugin to customize the registration page is remarkably easy.
To get started, click on the new Ultimate Member tab on your WordPress dashboard, then click on Forms. The following screen will contain three forms by default. We want to use the last one – Default Registration:
If you want to customize this form, you can use the Edit option. You will need to make your tweaks using the plugin’s own drag-and-drop builder:
The default registration form includes all the fields most websites would want, but you can add more by clicking on the plus sign below the last field. Here are some of the options for you to choose from:
Once you’ve selected the fields you want and rearranged them, you can edit each individually by clicking on the pencil icon next to their names. Doing so will bring up multiple options that depend on the field you’re working with. For example, these are the options available for the Username field:
When your form is ready, all you have to do is click on the Update button, and your changes will go live. It’s that simple.
Option 2: User Profiles Made Easy ($30)
As its name implies, User Profiles Made Easy focuses on adding new features that impact user profiles and their management. For example, it enables your users to set up social media-like profiles, complete with cover images, detailed information, and even lists of their most recent comments.
Furthermore, this feature-packed plugin also provides you with several options to customize the registration page. Let’s check out how.
How to get started with User Profiles Made Easy:
Unlike Ultimate Member, User Profiles Made Easy doesn’t enable you to build your registration page field by field. Instead, it provides you with seven unique registration processes:
- Default registration with a random password
- Default registration with a user-selected password
- Registration with activation via email
- Registration pending approval
- User registration with activation via email and pending approval
- Use of social network accounts to register
- Registering with an invitation code
All you have to do is choose which process you’d prefer to use for your site, and save your changes.
This plugin may not be as in-depth as Ultimate Member, but it makes for an excellent alternative if you just want an option that’s quick to set up – and if you like the look of User Profiles Made Easy’s other features.
Conclusion
Learning how to customize a registration page is a simple time investment that can pay off more than you’d imagine. Your new page will enable you to flaunt your branding and collect critical information about your users, which can always come in handy for analytic purposes.
If you’d like to customize your registration page today, these are two of the best plugins you can use to get the job done:
- Ultimate Member: Enables you to tweak every aspect of your registration pages.
- User Profiles Made Easy: Offers you several registration-page presets to chose from for a quick setup.
Do you have any questions about how to customize WordPress registration page? Ask away in the comments section below!
Oh, and before you go, if you want to customize your WordPress login page while you’re at it, check out another guide of ours.
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