User roles are great for content restriction, but sometimes they are too coarse. When you need finer control, you can restrict Elementor content by capability: Restrict for Elementor lets you show or hide any section, column or widget in the Elementor page builder to users who have a specific WordPress capability. This guide explains what capabilities are, how to find them, and how to use one as a restriction criterion.
Roles vs. capabilities
As covered in our guide on restricting content by user role, roles are a powerful WordPress feature. What you might not know is that each user role consists of many user capabilities, and each capability allows the user to access or do one small thing – for example edit_posts, edit_pages, delete_posts or delete_pages. You can find the full list in the WordPress roles and capabilities documentation.
Certain capabilities are shared across multiple user roles: edit_posts, for example, is available to the Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator roles. It is also not uncommon for plugins to register custom capabilities that grant custom user roles access to certain areas of the plugin. If you would like to see exactly which capabilities each role on your website has, install the User Role Editor plugin – it clearly shows all the capabilities for every user role.
Knowing all this, it is easy to see why capabilities are included as restriction criteria in Restrict for Elementor: they let you granularly control what each user can see, often with a single rule where roles would require several.
How to restrict Elementor content by capability
- Add or select a section, column or widget in the Elementor page builder.
- Open the Content tab and locate the Restrict area.
- Select Users with specific capability – a field is revealed below.
- Enter the capability you want to use as criteria, for example
edit_posts. - Set the Action to Show or Hide.
Practical examples
Say you want a certain section, column or widget to be accessible to all registered users on your website except those with the Subscriber user role. You could select Users with specific role and tick every role except Subscriber – and that would work. But with capabilities, you can simply enter edit_posts and you are done, since that capability is found in all of WordPress’ default user roles except Subscriber.
Another example: your website has several custom user roles, all of which share some custom capability – let’s call it view_restricted_content. By using that capability as the criterion, one rule shows or hides the element for all the users that have it, including any roles you add later that receive the same capability.
Tips
- Enter the capability exactly as it is registered in WordPress – for example
edit_posts, all lowercase with an underscore. A typo means the rule will not match any users. - Not sure which capability to use? Open the User Role Editor plugin’s role overview and copy the capability name from there.
- Test the result in a private or incognito window, or while logged in as a user who does not have the capability, to confirm the element behaves the way you expect.
- If your rule is really about one or two whole roles rather than a permission, the user role condition may be the simpler choice.
Show alternative content instead of hiding
If you want, you can display alternative content to users who do not fulfill the required criteria – either an Elementor template or a custom formatted message – instead of hiding the element entirely. Read more in the alternative content guide.