Last week I told you about the Wordfence plugin and how you should have your user name be anything but “admin.” And after “admin” it should not be something obvious, like your name or your blog’s name. I keep getting hackers/bots trying to login with tiaskitchen. (Hint to hackers and bots- It ain’t gonna work.)
And the best thing would be to have some jumbled mess for a login name.
Then someone brought up a good point. (cough) Thank you, Tessa the Domestic Diva! (/cough)
WordPress won’t let you just change your username.
But there is a way around this. And you can change your username in WordPress. It takes a little work, but it is worth it if it will save your blog in the long run. So, here it is…
How to Change Your Username in WordPress
- Create a new user with the role of administrator.
- Use crazy name.
- Immediately change old “admin” user to a “No Role for This Site” role instead of an administrator role.
- Change all posts and pages to the new author. (Assuming this is a one person operation)
- Delete old user.
- Bam! You have changed your username in WordPress.
Well, that is the quick step by step. Now for the detailed version with screenshots. (That would be much easier to understand, right?)
Step 1 – Create a new user with the role of administrator.
From your Dashboard, go down the left hand menu until you get to Users. Either click to get the menu to open up and click “Add New.” Or use the fly-out menu when you hover over it, and click “Add New.”
Step 2 – From this window fill in all of the boxes. Make sure to use a crazy Username, such as the example below. (That example user will be deleted by the time the post goes live.) WordPress doesn’t seem to like strange characters, like %$^, but you can still use a jumble of numbers with capital and lowercase letters. Don’t forget to make this user and Administrator where it says, “Role.”
done! Although it would not let me delete my admin user profile, or change it’s roll as admin. So now I have two administrators, but I changed the password to something crazy on both, so should be good. Thank you!
You do have to change role and delete from the new administrator user. Was that it?
I am totally confused. I was able to delete mine, no problem. Did you change all of the posts and page authors to your new profile? Ugh! I want to figure this out.
~Tia
yes, I changed everything so that the old one has no post assigned…but it does not have the drop down menu to assign a different function to it, and when I try to assign it different role from the all users page, it won;t let me.
Make sure you resigned is as your “new” administrator. I read in a forum that someone was trying to do this and wordpress kept automatically signing them in as the old one and they didn’t realize it. A good way to figure it out is if you go to the All Users page and hover over each user, it will prompt edit/delete under the user name, except the one you are signed in as. Then it will one say edit. And you do not have the option to change your own role or delete yourself. I hope this works. I searched, and I haven’t found this happening to anyone else.
Or your computer is haunted. 😉
LOL! No it simply wouldn’t delete the user since I was logged in as it! Once I logged out and then logged back in with the new profile, it allowed me to! Victory!
Yay!!!!! High Fives!