How To: Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink

This guest post was written by John of The WordPress Expert, where he writes about WordPress tips, services, themes, plugins, and more.  If you have WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

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.