How to change the author of an article in WordPress

If we have a website under WordPress in which several people write, surely on more than one occasion we have seen the need to change the author of an article. Either because modifications have been made a posteriori and we want to change the authorship or because there is a person to create the articles, while others to give them content.

And, although this change is made relatively in a simple way, it would not be the first time that, to change the author, we have seen how someone creates a new article and paste all the content of another. We will not deny that this method works. But let’s look at other less orthopedic methods, which are simpler and faster to perform.

Checking the Authors of our website

In the first place, we are going to verify that we have as authors the person or persons to whom we want to give the authorship of the articles. For this, from the WordPress Administration Panel, we go to the Users section. Once inside we will see that any user with a profile with editing permission (Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator) can edit an entry or article. And therefore, they can appear as the author of it. If you want to know more about the users and roles of each of them, we invite you to take a look at the WordPress codex, where you will see a more detailed explanation of each of them.

We must be the Web Administrators to change the profile of users. This saves us headaches in which any user can change their profile or that of any other user.

Changing the Slug of an Author

Taking advantage of the fact that we are in this area of our WordPress, I wanted to show you something more. If, as Administrators, we edit a user, in addition to being able to change our profile, as we have commented previously, we can do other things. Among them, edit the Slug of the Author. This allows us to display the name of the author correctly in the URL of our web browser.

Within a user’s edit page, we go down to a part called Edit Author Slug. Here we can choose from those offered by WordPress, based on the author’s data that we have introduced or create a custom one; one more option to improve the SEO of our website.

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Author Slug customization

In addition, we can improve this URL even more if in the WordPress Dashboard we go to Settings> Edit Author Slug. Then, we will see that there are new options, so we can make not appear in front of our users / authors in the URL the word author, but one to our liking. Maybe we want to be named as writers, if we have a blog or as editors if it’s an online newspaper.

Changing the Author in an Entry

Well, after this short introduction about the authors, let’s focus on the main topic of this article: the change of author. With this first method, you will see how to change the author of a particular article.

First, you enter the editing screen of the article you want to change the author. Once inside, under the entry field of the article, you will see a section called Author. If you do not see this section, do not panic. Maybe you have it disabled. To activate it, in the top right you will see a tab called Screen Options. When clicking on it, a panel will open in which there are several options with their respective checkboxes. You check that the Author checkbox is activated, and the Author section must automatically appear under the text entry field of the article.

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Screen Options in WordPress

In this section, we will have a drop-down in which all the users with editing capacity will appear. We just have to select the one we want to be the new author of the article and save the changes using the Update button. Then, the new author will appear on our website.

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Authors in an article

Changing the Author in several Entries at once

This process that we have just carried out can be a bit heavy if there are several articles that we want to change their author. For this, let’s look at a second method.

author-entrade

From the WordPress Dashboard, we go to the All Posts section. Here, we select all the articles where we want to change the author by clicking on the checkbox that is to the left of the titles. Next, we display a panel that is just above the articles, which at this moment will have the name Bulk Actions and we change it to Edit. Click on the Apply button, and the options we see in the image above will be shown.

In the field Edit will be listed the articles that we have selected. And if we look for the Author drop-down we will see how, all the available authors on our website reappear. Again, we select the one we want, and click on the Update button.

And automatically, all changes will be applied. As you can see, this is a quick way to change the authors of several articles at the same time.

If you are curious, you will have seen that there are other options in this section that you have just discovered. For example, we can assign categories, allow comments or change the status of several articles at the same time. Surely if you did not know this option, you will be glad you discovered it.

And that’s it. We hope you liked it, and any matter or question that you want to ask us, you have the comments open to write us!

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