How to Get the User ID in WordPress

Sometimes, you need a user ID for some plugin settings or troubleshooting. Let’s see how you can find the ID of a user in the WordPress dashboard and also programatically.

How to get the user ID from the WordPress dashboard

1 – You have to go to your WordPress dashboard and hover over Users in your sidebar, and click on All Users

2 – Search for the user

3 – Press on Edit

4 – Now, if you check the URL of the page you are on, you’ll see that after user-edit.php, there is a parameter called user_id. The number that comes after the equal sign is the ID of that user.

In my example, the ID is 79.

How to get a user’s ID programmatically

If you are looking for a solution to get a user’s ID programmatically in WordPress, here is the function I prefer and the one I use almost whenever I need to retrieve a user or any of their data.

The function I prefer the most is get_user_by(). Here is how I would use it to get the ID of a given user, assuming that I know the user’s email.

// This generates a WP_User object with the data of that user
$user = get_user_by( 'email', '[email protected]' );

// Here is the ID of the user
$user_id = $user->ID;

How to get the current user’s ID programmatically

WordPress has a function that retrieves the current user’s ID if they are logged in while accessing the page.

The function is get_current_user_id().

Also, with that function, you can get the WP_User object of the current user. Here is how:

// The user ID
$user_id = get_current_user_id();

// The WP_User object
$user = get_user_by( 'id', $user_id );