How to Change Author URL Slug in WordPress Without Any Plugin

WordPress default Author URL slug same as Author username. Thus, anyone can know the username of the Author. For security reasons, you want to hide your real username from Author URL slug. In this article, we are discussing How to change Author Slug is the last part of the Author URL without any plugin.

Change Author URL Slug in WordPress

For example, Our Author URL of this site is 
https://speedysense.com/author/sseditorial

And our Author slug is “sseditorial”. We have to change Author slug “speedysense” to make our new Author URL of this site is
https://speedysense.com/author/speedysense

WordPress already have a username and nicename fields. username is used to validate login. However, nicename is used to create Author Permalink and Post Permalink. When creating a new user, WordPress automatically generates the nicename (same as given username). Once the user created, you can not change username later in the admin area. Thus, we display nicename in the User profile screen.

Let’s see how to change nicename to anything unique that you would like without using any plugin.

Add these codes in your themes function.php file.

/**
 * Start output buffering
 * @return void
 */
function user_slugname_edit_ob_start() {
    ob_start();
}
add_action( 'personal_options', 'user_slugname_edit_ob_start' );

/**
 * Display Nicename field below the Username
 * @param object $user The current WP_User object.
 * @return void
 */
function create_slugname_input( $user ) {
    $content = ob_get_clean();

    // Find the correct class
    $regex = '/<tr(.*)class="(.*)buser-user-login-wrapb(.*)"(.*)>([sS]*?)</tr>/';

    // HTML code for new field in table row
    $nicename_row = sprintf(
        '<tr class="user-user-nicename-wrap"><th><label for="user_nicename">%1$s</label></th><td><input type="text" name="user_nicename" id="user_nicename" value="%2$s" class="regular-text" />' . "n" . '<span class="description">%3$s</span><p>This field will update to last part of the author URL to hide real username.</p></td></tr>',
        esc_html__( 'Nicename' ),
        esc_attr( $user->user_nicename ),
        esc_html__( 'Must be unique.' )
    );

    // Insert the row in the content
    echo preg_replace( $regex, '' . $nicename_row, $content );
}
add_action( 'show_user_profile', 'create_slugname_input' );
add_action( 'edit_user_profile', 'create_slugname_input' );

/**
 * Function handle user profile updates
 * @param object  &$errors Instance of WP_Error class.
 * @param boolean $update  True if updating an existing user, false if saving a new user.
 * @param object  &$user   User object for user being edited.
 * @return void
 */
function slugname_profile_update( $errors, $update, $user ) {
    if ( !$update ) return;

    if ( empty( $_POST['user_nicename'] ) ) {
        $errors->add(
            'empty_nicename',
            sprintf(
                '<strong>%1$s</strong>: %2$s',
                esc_html__( 'Error' ),
                esc_html__( 'Please enter a Nicename.' )
            ),
            array( 'form-field' => 'user_nicename' )
        );
    } else {
        $user->user_nicename = $_POST['user_nicename'];
    }
}
add_action( 'user_profile_update_errors', 'slugname_profile_update', 10, 3 );

Note: If this is your first time to adding code snippets in WordPress, then we suggest you use Code Snippets Plugin.

Simply above code allow you to change the nicename on the user profile screen. Once you change, Author URL will update on everywhere.

Here are set “speedysense”. Thus our new Author URL will be expected as per we want.

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