How to Change the Author in WordPress – With Best Solutions

WordPress as a platform offers the writers a chance to be featured in their articles as an author, and this is a great feature. You can learn how to change the author in WordPress, this might come in handy in the future.

Having the author feature, the authors get the needed exposure and the correct accreditation for the work they have done. Also, it’s nice to put a face or character to the article piece that you were reading about, isn’t it?

However great this feature is, WordPress doesn’t make it simple to change the author from an article, and that’s why the need for this article arises. There are many reasons why you would need to change the author of a post, and for whatever that might be, there’s a solution.

In fact, there are many ways you can go about changing the author of an article, and I will explain them to you. In this article, I will talk about some of the main reasons why you would need to change the author from an article.

Also, there are going to be many different ways that you can achieve that, so I will show you all of them one by one. Not only to display how you can do that but also to explain along the way.

Change the Author of an Article in WordPress

I will admit that this is not a problem most people who use WordPress have since this is very specific. However it happens a lot more than you would think it does. If you are a blogger that single-handedly operates the entire website, then I’m assuming you are not going to need this information, but it can be useful.

Because you might not want to show the author information on the articles. In this article, you are going to learn how to do that, so don’t leave and look further below. On the other hand, if you own or operate a blog that has multiple writers in its arsenal, then I suggest that you look carefully as this might come in handy.

What usually happens with these big content hub websites is that the content the authors write is consider a property of the publication and the authors. If a writer decides to leave the team, you might want to change the articles that he or she has written to someone who is on the team still.

This way, it only benefits the site owners and shows an effort of professionalism. Another reason is that you might have used an editor’s name to associate the articles in the beginning, but now you’ve had a change of heart and want to use your real identity.

The same can be said if you have invite a new author and want to test him before, so you use an alias before accepting them to the team. You can learn how to change the author name and the status of an author in different ways using WordPress.

As you can see from these examples, there are a lot of different reasons that come up as to why you need to change the author name, so it’s not so bad to learn about it and have this skill in your repertoire.

So let’s continue with the ways in which you can change the author’s name in WordPress with and without using plugins.

Also Read :How to Add Categories in WordPress – Best Effective Ways

How to Change the Author in WordPress

In the previous section, I listed many reasons why you would need to change the author but don’t worry, there are equally or more ways how you can achieve that with WordPress. As I briefly mentioned above, this can be done with and without using a plugin, so I will show you the ways you can do that.

Let’s start first with a simple method that works best if you are changing a post’s author to an existing one.

How to Change a Post’s Author to an Existing One

This one is really simple to do, and you can easily do this if you are using the new WordPress Gutenberg Block Editor. First, you need to access the Posts from your Dashboard and open the one that you want to make the change.

This new and improved text editor has a lot of features and benefits, so I would suggest anyone use it rather than the classic one. From the right-side panel in the text editor, select the Document tab, and under the Status & Visibility section, you will see the Author field.

As you can see from the picture below, there is already an author selected, and if you want to change it, just click on the name, and a dropdown menu will open.

From there, you can select the replacement author, and all that’s left is to press the update button, and you are done. Now you have learned how to change the author of a post to an existing author on your website.

However, this was done using the Gutenberg editor, and I wouldn’t feel okay with myself if I didn’t include the way to do it in the Classic editor. Since I know a large part of the community still values the Classic editor and uses it.

So once again, open an article that you want to replace the author and look for ‘Screen Options’ at the top right side of the window and click it, as shown in the picture.

When you click it, you will see a bunch of options, but we are interested in the author, so find that and mark it with a tick.

After you have done that you can close the ‘Screen Options’ by clicking it. You will need to scroll to the bottom of your article and look for the Author section that has been added. There you will see a dropdown menu that will show all your available authors similar to the Gutenberg editor one.Once you have changed the author, all that is left for you to do is to press update & you will see the update author on your article. There’s also a method that allows you to do this with whatever editor you are using, and in fact, it’s also a lot quicker.

Okay, different from the previous methods for this one, you don’t need to open the article you just need to be at the Posts page. From there, hover over the preferred article and click on the ‘Quick Edit’ button and then, you can see a few new options.There you will see the author dropdown menu as shown in the picture above, from where you can change the author easily. When you have made the change, you can press update from there since . It’s a convenient button in the bottom right of this Quick Edit section.

Also Read :How to Hide Author in WordPress – Step by Step Solutions

How to Add a New Author and Assign Existing Posts to Them

In WordPress, adding a new author is made only by the website administrator or someone who has the necessary privileges. This process, however, isn’t done in either text editor but somewhere else.

You need to create a new user account for this new Contributor an Author that you are adding to your website. From your WordPress Dashboard, you need to select the Users tab. Then when the page loads, you need to press the ‘Add New’ button located top left of the window.

When you click the button, you will see a new form open up where you need to add information for the author. As you can see in the picture below.

An important piece of information is the role that this new user will get. If you click on the dropdown menu, you can change the role from a Subscriber to an Author very quickly.

When you are done with this form, click on the ‘Add New User’ button, and there you have it, the new Author on your website. Once the new user is set up with the latest Author account, you can start assigning him/her the articles with one of the methods previously mentioned.

How to Remove or Hide the Author’s Name From WordPress Articles

Having an Author’s name on your blog posts is not always the right move for some people. You might be the only writer on a blog, so there’s no reason why you would want to put your name on the end of every post while the whole blog is yours. This way, it doesn’t become too repetitive as there will always be one writer, and that is you.

There are also large websites that have multiple writers who sometimes opt to leave out the names of the authors. This happens because in this way, there is less individualism and more of a corporate feeling. It can help the company more as there are fewer distractions, and people are focus more on the brand.

To remove the Author’s name from your website, there are two ways you can choose to do it. The first way is a bit more complex since it requires you to do some changes in your website’s theme. First, you will need to navigate from your Dashboard to Appearance, and under it, find and click the Customize button.

That will open the customization features for your theme, and you need to look for the Additional CSS area. Most themes have this option located at the end of the list. So if you can’t find it make sure to look there.

When you find the Additional CSS section make sure to add this piece of code that I will leave below. When you add the code, hit Publish and view the results of the change in your website.

Here is the code snippet also :

If this code did nothing, then don’t worry as the other method will definitely do the job. All you need to do is to install a plugin called ‘WP Meta and Date Remover’. I’m assuming you know how to install and activate a plugin by now, so I’m not explaining that.

After you have installed & activated this plugin for your website. Now all you need to do is to choose to hide the meta-information about the author from the settings. It’s effortless and straightforward, and I’m sure none of you will have any problem figuring it out.

Also Read :How to Create WordPress Splash Pages – the Best Guidelines

How to Change a Post’s Author to an Existing One in Bulk

This is fairly similar to the first topic I talked about changing the authors on a post. Now I’m showing you how to do this in bulk & you don’t spend hours individually changing the authors on the posts.

Let’s take the same example as well i.e.: an author has left your writing team. Now you need to change the author of the articles that this person wrote. Let’s say he has done 100 posts for you. To change them one by one would be too much work and time wasted.

That’s why WordPress has a shortcut for this very reason. The first step is to navigate to the Posts page from your Dashboard. Select all the posts that you need to change the author & press on the Bulk Actions dropdown menu & select the Edit option, and press Apply.

A new form will open, and there you will see a lot of options that you can change. Click on the Author dropdown menu, select the other existing Author and press the Update button at the bottom right. It’s as simple and quick as that.

Closing Thoughts

The reasons as to why you would need to change the post’s authors may vary. There are a lot of ways you can accomplish that, but if you take your time. You can select the right approach. I hope that I helped many of you with this article & you use this newly gained knowledge in the future. For any questions around the topic, leave a comment down below, and I will reply as soon as possible.