“Author archives” is one of a number of names you might call the page where WordPress shows posts published by a single author. And by default, WordPress will put the /author/ URL segment into your post’s URL. Personally, I think that’s a good name for it. But not everyone agrees, and you might want to change it to something else.
In this guide, we’ll explain how you can change your author page URL from example.com/author/david to example.com/this-person-rocks/david. If you want, of course. The point is that the whole middle section can be anything /writer/, /ninja/, /queen-of-the-world/.
But now, seriously, there are legitimate use cases for when you might want to change it. Like using /member/ for membership sites, /team/ for company employees, etc.
Better URLs with Edit Author Slug
Here’s how to change the /author/ URL segment to something else. I’ll be changing it to /queen/, but you can replace that below with absolutely whatever you want.
- Install and activate the Edit Author Slug plugin.
- Navigate to Settings > Edit Author Slug.
- In the text box labelled Author base, put in the string you want to replace
authorwith. For me, that’ll bequeen. - Click the Save button.
A Few More Notes About Editing the Author Slug
- Make sure to 301 redirect your old
authorURLs, if your site is older. The plugin does not make sure people hitting the old URL are forwarded to the new one. For a new site build, this isn’t a problem. But if Google (or other linkers you care about) might know the URL of the pages, SEO (etc) best practice will encourage you to make sure that you do a 301 Redirect to the new URLs. - While I didn’t write up this process, the plugin also allows specific author (users) on your site to change their own URL. So I could change from
/author/david/to/author/shrek/. - Additionally, you can vary the URLs of specific users to reflect their WordPress site role. I think for more complex publications (dozens of authors, some doing editing, etc), this might make sense. With this, I’d be a bit nervous about accidentally exposing user levels. So be careful before using this feature.
