Home | Advertise | Contact

RSS Feed | Email RSS

How To: Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink

By | Filed Under Hacks
Tag(s): ,

300x250 How To: Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink

Say you have an author page on your WordPress blog; but what happens when you find that your author archive URL looks like this?

http://example.com/author/Joe%20Smith/

Of course, you’d probably want to change your name to a more “URL-friendly” format like this:

http://example.com/author/joe-smith/

How do you do it?

Well, WordPress itself doesn’t let you (probably because the URL is intended to be a permalink), but it can still be accomplished through a simple database modification.

Here’s how. This is assuming your hosting account is setup with phpMyAdmin. (If you don’t have database editing experience, you might want to make a database backup just in case.)

  1. Go to your hosting account’s cPanel and click on the “phpMyAdmin” icon. If you don’t see it, look for a “MySQL Databases” icon, click it, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and then click the phpMyAdmin link.
  2. Select your WordPress database from the menu on the left.
  3. Select the wp_users table, and then click the “Browse” tab.
  4. Locate the row that has your username in the user_login column. Click the Edit button (the pencil icon) on that row.
  5. Enter the desired URL version of your name into the user_nicename field.
  6. Click “Go” to save your changes.

And that’s it! Your author archive will now show up at your new URL.

Want automatic updates? Subscribe to our RSS feed or
Get Email Updates sent directly to your inbox!
  • Print This

    • John Lamansky is a web developer who has been working with WordPress since 2005. He has created many WordPress themes and plugins and blogs at JohnLamansky.com.

    There Are 38 Responses So Far »

    • Pingback: Como alterar o link permanente do autor

    • http://potluckcreativearts.com Mark S. Meritt

      Thanks for this tip, but here’s a related question: Any idea how to make the author permalink use a different word other than “author”? E.g.:

      http://example.com/member/joe-smith/

      Standard WP permalinks Options allow a change for the category archives from “category” to a word of choice, but apparently no other types of archives. Thoughts?

      • http://blog.darkostanimirovic.com Darko

        Just for those who stumble here searching for a way to change author permalink base from something like:

        /author/joe-smith

        to

        /member/joe-smith

        you can easily achive it without messing up with rewrite.php file (which you’d probably have to edit every time there’s a WP update).

        So: in your theme’s functions.php file place this:

        global $wp_rewrite;
        $wp_rewrite->author_base = “member”; // or whatever
        $wp_rewrite->flush_rules();

        Off you go!

        • http://www.kayipdunya.com Altu? Gürkaynak

          thank you Darko thats excatly what I was looking for :) and I used it at kayipdunya.com now.. /cheers

          • http://belgraderaw.com Darko

            No problem, I’m glad it helped :-)

    • http://potluckcreativearts.com Mark S. Meritt

      Ahah, thanks!

    • Tim

      @Mark S. Merritt – if you open /wp-includes/rewrite.php and edit $author_base (line 183 in v. 2.6) to be whatever you want. The only thing to remember is that you will have to do this again if you upgrade this file down the road.

    • Pingback: 100+ Killer Wordpress Resources | Steffan Antonas' Blog

    • http://www.roleplayingpro.com Samuel Van Der Wall

      Great post that gets exactly to the issues and fixes it (if you initially identified the correct problem). You got yourself a suscriber off of this post.

    • Pingback: Author Link Broken with Custom Permalinks - One Theme Support Forums

    • http://dardna.com/custom-author-permalink dardna

      Yet related to Mark S. Meritt’s question, i’ve release a little plugin that could do exactly what you want, check it out here: Custom Author Permalink. Any thoughts on it are very welcome..

    • Hedley

      OK, I tried editing the database and removing the space between the first and last names. Worked perfectly. Thanks for posting this.

      But here’s my struggle: I’m supporting a client who uses WordPress to post articles from many writers. I could go into the database and adjust the ‘user_nicename’ for each of the ones who have the “Display Name Publicly As” field populated with two names separated by a space (ie: “Joe Smith”), though there are up to 100 of them. Manageable. The problem is, I don’t want to have to edit the database every time a new user is added.

      Though I like to avoid editing core files, in this case I would rather have to edit one core file when I upgrade WordPress than be editing the database for each new user. Is there a core file I can change so that the author.php uses “user_login” to retrieve info, but still displays “user_nicename”?

      Thanks!

    • http://blogs4businesses.com John

      Does anyone know how to get rid of /author/ all together?

      I’d like it to appear as http://example.com/john-doe/

    • http://techtadka.net abhi

      @john

      dont include author in custom structure .. use sth like /%postname%/ or sth

      http://techtadka.net/tutorials/web-tutorials/202-how-to-change-wordpress-post-url-permalinks.html

    • http://www.publishingacademy.com Debs Jenkins

      Hi Hedly
      I’m having the same problem and don;t want to edit the dbase – did you ever get a fix?
      Debs

    • Pingback: 101 List Of Awesome Wordpress Tips and Resources

    • http://www.jin-ohchoi.id.au/ Jin-oh Choi

      This was the solution, that I was looking for to solve the “error 404″ I was getting.

      Thanks again.

    • http://www.websitecleanup.com/ Emily

      Kyle, thank you very much for the info! This is exactly what I needed to do. Perhaps future versions of WordPress will allow editing of the author permalink… seems simple enough to add it to the user profile page.

    • http://www.websitecleanup.com/ Emily

      Just figured it out… it’s easy to add it to the user profile screen. Follow the directions here, but substitute user_nicename for twitter in the code.

      http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/09/10/adding-and-using-custom-user-profile-fields

      Hope this helps!

      Emily

    • Pingback: WordPress Hack for Author Permalinks | WebSiteCleanup.com

    • Pingback: 100+ Awesome Resource list for Wordpress | WebSenseLogic

    • Pingback: Wordpress Author Page Not Found (Error 404) if Space in URL? | Helge Klein

    • http://medicalopaedia.com Burhan Ahmed

      thanks for the tip u saved a lot of mess

    • http://www.precisionops.com Stan Mouser

      Thanks, Kyle!

      Even two years later, your solution worked like a charm! I’m on bluehost, and the instructions were both clear and relevant.

      Stan

    • Tony

      Thank you, it worked a charm. Really need it cos mine caused a broken link which need to be fixed. good explaination.

    • http://speedreadingtechniques.org/ mark ways

      Hi Kyle, I didn’t know I had this problem at all until I checked google’s webmaster tool. Fortunately, I found your guide to solve it very fast and easily. Thanks for your help, I appreciate that. Mark

    • http://www.tatilyerlerim.biz tatil yerleri

      Ahah, thanks!!

    • Chris Anger

      Great tip as always. never actually was aware of the problem. just fixed this at some of my blogs. Thanks for the hint.

    • Kid

      Or you can install this plugin, much easier and works on any hosting environment :)

      http://www.microkid.net/wordpress/author-slug/

    • http://totalinsights.co.uk yasin

      thanks, worked perfectly for me

    • http://www.HealthAndHomeTopics.com Connie Myres

      Thanks you! You’re article helped me fix the problem.

    • Pingback: Wordpress: Help! My author page isn’t displaying… | Health and Home Topics

    • http://petercoughlin.com Peter Coughlin

      Excellent.. super quick fix.. thanks Kyle!

    • http://wphacks.com Nikhil Arora

      Hi Friend,

      Thanks for this nice trick.
      But i have a question.
      I want to change my author page url to:

      author/name/

      instead of

      author/name

      Actually i am getting an issue of redirect.

      Thanks.

    • christiann

      This was really helpful because I’m using email addresses as usernames on my site, so I didn’t want the author URLs to expose email addresses. So I ran this query on my whole wp_users table:

      UPDATE wp_users SET user_nicename = ID

      So now my URLs look like this: example.com/author/32

      Not as SEO friendly, but much better than unintentionally giving away my users’ email addresses. Thanks!

    • Pingback: Custom author URL for WordPress blog | http://blog.hashbangweb.com

    • http://zoomspring.com Jordan Godbey

      Hi Kyle,

      I had the exact problem you stated, my author archive went to

      /author/Jordan%20Godbey

      and my nicename in the database was “Jordan Godbey”

      So I went into phpMySql and changed it to “Jordan-Godbey”

      Now the link just returns me to the homepage everytime I click the author link of a page written by me… Any ideas? it’s showing the new “correct” link of zoomspring.com/author/Jordan-Godbey but nothing happens when you click the link.

      Thanks for any help,
      Jordan

    • http://www.momorice.com kentzo

      I am encoutering this problem.

      When I display the arhive for author with spaces in between their name,

      The link displayed is eg. /author/John Smith . And when you click it, the url will be then translated to /author/John%20Smith

      And I suppose this will work as %20 is safe url encoding. However i still get page 404 error.

      Of course when I use the method suggested by Kyle, meaning replace the user_nicename in database from John Smith to John-Smith, things will work.

      But why does the %20 will not work in this case. It seems to me this problem should be fixed by later wordpress http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/2467

      • http://zoomspring.com Jordan Godbey

        I realized that for me it was a stupid mistake on my end.. I am use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast and there is a feature you can turn on that disables the author archives for single author sites. It will automatically forward you to the homepage instead if you try to go to /author/author-name

        I unchecked that radio button and the author profile worked fine after I changed the nicename from Jordan Godbey to Jordan-Godbey

    • http://www.getexactsolution.com 1step2k

      Hello Kyle,

      Great post…Was looking for this and it provides exactly what I needed in simple steps. Thank you!
      Cheers :)

    • Eric R. W.

      Thanks for the tip, but this really sucks. Is there really not a better way to do this? I will be allowing a bunch of people to sign up and I don’t really want to do this everytime.

      Is there a way to edit the code?

    • http://www.andychandler.com Andy Chandler

      I use godaddys seo service and its telling me “119 pages have no description tags”
      here is example of the many pages
      http://andychandler.com/author/andychandler/
      http://andychandler.com/tag/affordable-business/

      problem is i cannot find the “author” or “tag” pages to add a description tag.
      Any ideas ?

    • http://www.thelacunablog.com Sk

      Thank you! It worked perfectly.

    • http://www.wezley.com Wes

      Worked perfect for me too. Thanks, Kyle!.

    • http://charlestonscrealestate.net/ Peter

      Thank you so much! I was trying to fix this and just got it fixed today. Explained very well. Cheers!

    • http://www.bradryanbice.com Brad

      Thank you for this!

    • http://cupus.org Pedro Estopinan

      Thank you so much! This tut helped me fix my broken author url structure. No idea how it got messed up, but this guide did the trick!