WP Author Slug
Add a layer of security and prevent your login name from being shown in the author archive's URL.
Maintenance 54/100112d since update
Active installs
2,000
Downloads
34,187
Reviews
19
Age
14.9y
Tagssecurityauthorurlslugauthor archive
Plugin info
Total downloads: 34,187
Active installs: 2,000
Total reviews: 19
Average rating: 4.8
Support threads opened: 0
Support threads resolved: 0 (0%)
Available in: 3 language(s)
Contributors: 2
Last updated: 9/9/2025 (112 days ago)
Added to WordPress: 2/21/2011 (14 years old)
Minimum WordPress version: 3.0
Tested up to WordPress version: 6.8.3
Minimum PHP version: f
Maintenance & Compatibility
Maintenance score
Maintained • Last updated 112 days ago • 19 reviews
54/100
Is WP Author Slug abandoned?
Likely maintained (last update 112 days ago).
Compatibility
Requires WordPress: 3.0
Tested up to: 6.8.3
Requires PHP: f
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Description
This plugin replaces the author slug with a sanitized version of the user’s display name.
This plugin will not prevent hackers from finding out your login name but the login name won’t be visible
in the author archive’s URL, which works towards your friendly URLs with using your display name.
DO NOT use this on a site with more than 1000 registered users, as updating all of their nicenames at once might break your site.
Installation
- Download WP Author Slug.
- Unzip the folder into the
/wp-content/plugins/directory. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
Frequently Asked Questions
No FAQ available
Review feed
Knut Sparhell
Excellent
Easy way to add some obscurity to login guessing.
But please update as it's over 2 years now.
Peter
Don't use if you have a large user database
This plugin would probably work OK if you have a small number of users (e.g. if your site doesn't allow public login). But if you have a large number of users (e.g. if you are running ecommerce or allow users to register for other reasons), this plugin will probably take down your site.
The reason is that there are hooks that run when you activate or delete the plugin. It runs database fetch and update queries on every user in your database, all in-line on the request (rather than background via a cron). So if you have a thousand or more users it attempts to do a thousand or more database writes when you click Activate or Delete from the plugins list. This will likely grind your website to a halt.
It would be better/useable if you could either choose to only apply these scripts to specific user types (e.g. Author) or if you could run the update in batches in the background.
Screenshots
No screenshots available
Changelog
5
- Added conflict detection for author slugs that match existing page slugs. Props @knutsp.
- Tested with WordPress 6.8.
4
- Moved clean up to plugin deactivation. This makes sure author slugs are only modified with the plugin active.
- Updated utility class.
- Tested with WordPress 6.1.
3
- Maintenance release.
- Checks if keys and properties exist before using them.
- Tested with WordPress 5.6.
2
- Maintenance release.
- Updated code to adhere to WordPress Coding Standards.
- Tested with WordPress 5.0.
1.3.0
- Maintenance release.
- Tested with WordPress 4.0.
1.2.2
- Updated utility class.
- Tested with WordPress 3.4.1.
1.2.1
- Updated uninstall.php and activation hook to use WordPress User API instead of custom queries.
- Updated utility class.
1.2
- Tested for WordPress 3.3.1.
1.1
- Tested for WordPress 3.1.1.
- Added complete uninstall routine.
- Added compatibility for pre-3.1 multisite installs.
1.0
- Initial Release.