How Can I Change How My Author Name Appears in WordPress?

When you are signed into your WordPress user account and you publish a post, your author name is typically included somewhere on that post. But you may have noticed that your author name is appearing as your username, which may not be ideal.

Fortunately WordPress gives you a couple of different options for displaying your author name on your posts. Our guide below will show you where to locate the setting that adjusts this option so that you can select another name display that is more preferable.

How to Change Displayed Author Name in WordPress

The steps in this article were performed on a WordPress site running the 5.2.2 version of the application.

Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your WordPress site at (yourdomain.com)/wp-admin.

Step 2: Hover over the Users tab at the left side of the window, then select the Your Profile option. Alternatively you could click the profile icon at the top-right of the window as well. If you wish to change the author name for someone else on the site, then choose All Users and click on the desired username instead.

Step 3: Scroll down to the Display name publicly as option, then click the dropdown menu and choose the desired option. Note that your listed options will be based on the information entered in the fields directly above the dropdown.

Step 4: Scroll to the bottom of the menu and click the Update Profile button.

Note that changing this setting is not going to adjust the author slug that is used on the author page which lists all of your public posts. If you would like to change your author slug, you can do so with a plugin like this one.

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Matt Burleigh

Matt has been working with WordPress and creating content using this powerful content management system for years. While he has written about many other tech topics, WordPress is one of his favorites.