How to Change Author URL Slug and Base in WordPress:- Do you wanna change author url slug and base in WordPress? WordPress comes with in-built support for SEO friendly url structure which is also known as permalinks. This feature enables you to select urls for your pages, posts and categories by editing their slugs.
This feature also builds permalinks for author pages. However there is no choice to customize the author url. Today in this post, we will let you know how to easily change author url slug and base in WordPress.
What is a URL Slug and URL Base?
In WordPress, a slug is title of publicly viewable page formatted to be used in urls.
For example: https://example.com/author/david-john/
In this, david-john is slug and author is the base. While users can change slug and base for post, page, categories and tags, it’s impossible to modify author url. If you want to use ‘contributor’ instead of ‘author’ or if you want to modify author slug altogether, then you’re at the right place.
Changing The Author Slug in WordPress:-
The Initial thing you need to do is to install & activate the edit author slug plugin.
After activation, the plugin will add a group of options to each user profile page. If you want to edit user slug on your site then you need to navigate to users>> All users page. Then click on ‘edit’ link on below.
This will navigate you to edit user screen. Scroll down to ‘Edit author slug’ section and you will see a number of options that you can use as author slug. Even you can enter a custom slug. Once you have done the changes, Click on update user and preview your website.
Now when you tap on author name in post to view the author page, you’ll see that it make use of slug you choose for them.
Changing Author Base:-
If you’re developing a site where you want to change the author base from /author/ to something else, then you can do that with this plugin.
Simply Navigate to Settings>> Edit Author Slug page. Here you’ll see an option to change author base and even select different author base for users with different user roles.
Once you’ve finished, click on save changes to store the settings. Now you can preview your site and click author link to see the actions.
Setting up Redirects for SEO Purposes:-
Changing author slug & base on established website can have negative ramification on SEO especially when author archives is indexed.
People coming from organic search through search engines will see 404 error messages. To avoid this setup redirects from old to new slug.