The term online users refers to the users logged in to the site and accessing the site on any given occasion. The process of identifying and displaying online users is important for both site owners and site users, depending on the type of site. In a learning management system, online users are useful for administrators to find how many staff members are helping the students and to assign staff when necessary, based on the availability of staff members online. Also, in a real-time chat application, this feature is useful from a user's perspective to see which users are available for chatting. This feature also indicates that the site is being deployed by many users, to attract more users.

The default WordPress features are not capable of providing a list of online users. In this recipe, we are going to use a free plugin to display online users on the site, using a shortcode.