How to Edit the Author Slug in WordPress

“Author archives” are one of a number of names you might call the page where WordPress shows your (as opposed to other authors’) posts. And by default WordPress will put the /author/ URL segment into your slug. Personally I think that’s a good name for it. But not everyone agrees, and that’s where the Edit Author Slug plugin comes in. In this Quick 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.

Anyway, here’s a video explaining how to change the author slug segment in WordPress:

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.

1. Install and activate the “Edit Author Slug” plugin.
2. Navigate to “Settings > Edit Author Slug”.
3. In the text-box labelled “Author base”, put in the sting you want to replace author with. For me that’ll be queen.
4. Click the “Save” button.

A Few More Notes About the Edit Author Slug Plugin

• Make sure to 301 redirect your old author URLs, 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 your 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/1.
• 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. I’m a bit nervous about accidentally exposing user levels, but mostly it just seems like a distinction *no* site visitor will find valuable.