How to Sync Your WordPress Employee Directory with Active Directory or LDAP

If your organization runs an on-premises Active Directory server or another LDAP-based directory, keeping a separate employee directory on your WordPress site in sync usually means manual exports and re-imports every time someone joins, leaves, or changes roles. For organizations with 100 to 1,000+ employees spread across departments and locations, that quickly becomes unmanageable.

This guide covers what Active Directory and LDAP sync actually does for a WordPress employee directory, how the connection works, and what to check before setting it up.

What are Active Directory and LDAP?

Active Directory is Microsoft’s on-premises directory service, used by many organizations to manage user accounts, permissions, and authentication across internal systems. LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) is the underlying protocol Active Directory is built on, and it’s also used by other directory systems outside the Microsoft ecosystem. If your organization runs its own domain controllers rather than a cloud identity service, your employee data most likely lives in Active Directory or another LDAP-based server.

Why sync AD/LDAP with your WordPress directory

Without a direct connection, your WordPress employee directory and your AD/LDAP server are two separate systems that drift apart the moment either one changes. A new hire is added to Active Directory on day one, but might not show up on the website directory for weeks. Someone changes departments, and the public directory still shows their old team.

Syncing the two systems means:

New employees appear on the directory automatically once they’re added to AD or LDAP, no manual entry required.
Departing employees are removed or deactivated without a separate manual update.
Department, title, and reporting line changes update on the directory the moment they change in AD or LDAP.

How the connection works

Employee Directory for WordPress connects to Active Directory or LDAP through a dedicated sync add-on. It authenticates against your domain controller or LDAP server and pulls employee data on a schedule you set, from every few hours to once a day, so your directory reflects your actual organizational data without anyone manually exporting or uploading files.

Beyond basic sync, the connection supports:

Multiple servers: connect more than one Active Directory server independently, useful for organizations with multiple entities, and set a priority order for which server’s data takes precedence when records overlap.
Field mapping: choose exactly which AD or LDAP fields sync to WordPress, rather than pulling everything.
Filtering: sync only specific users or groups, useful for large organizations that don’t want every account in the directory syncing over.
Scheduled sync: run on demand, or schedule hourly, daily, or weekly updates.
Secure connections: TLS or SSL (LDAPS) between WordPress and your directory server.

What to check before setting this up

A few things worth confirming with your IT team before connecting AD or LDAP to a WordPress directory:

Server access details. You’ll need your Host/Domain Controller information and, in most setups, a service account with read access to the directory.
Base DN and search scope. Defining the right Base DN determines which part of your directory tree gets searched and synced.
Which fields you want synced. Directory servers often hold more fields than you’ll want visible on a public-facing directory, worth deciding what to expose before going live.
Public vs. internal directory. If the directory is public-facing, confirm which employee data is appropriate to display externally versus what should stay internal-only.

Active Directory/LDAP vs. Microsoft Entra ID

Active Directory and LDAP are on-premises directory systems. If your organization instead manages identity through Microsoft’s cloud (Entra ID, formerly Azure AD), that’s a different connection method, covered in our Microsoft Entra ID sync guide. Some organizations run a hybrid setup with both, in which case which one to sync from depends on where your authoritative employee data actually lives.

Not sure Employee Directory is the right fit at all? See our comparison of employee directory plugins for WordPress by organization size and use case.

Getting started

Employee Directory’s core plugin handles CSV import/export and the full directory, org chart, and search experience out of the box. Active Directory and LDAP sync is available as an add-on for organizations that want the connection to stay live automatically rather than re-importing on a schedule.