How to Replace the Admin Username

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Hi. Barbara Feldman of WordHer.com here with a video demonstration in how to remove the user name Admin from your WordPress site.

The Admin user name is a problem because it for years was the default user name installed on every installation of WordPress, and the spammers and the hackers know this and it is the first username they try to use to gain access to your site.

So, we are not gonna use it anymore, and we’re not gonna use Admin and we’re not gonna use the name of your site, like “Dear Barbara,” and we’re not gonna use your personal name like “Barbara Feldman.” We’re gonna come up with a unique name and we’re gonna get rid of Admin and so here is how we start.

First of all, it is really simple to do. But just to be sure, before I ever make changes like this to a site where I could get locked out or something could get messed up, I make a backup; a database backup, of my WordPress site.

Now, I use a premium plugin Backup Buddy. And that’s written about at my site. But there are several free versions that I also recommend. And that is a topic for another day.

OK, seven seconds, done.

Now, let’s go on to the task at hand. Let’s take a look at what users we have on our site at the moment.

OK, so here is the dreaded Admin username, with my real name, my email address, and 42 posts.

So, we are not going to delete this now. What we’re going to do now is create a new Admin account. Someone with administrative role, but not with the Admin name. So, we’re going to click on Add New and we’re going to come up with a name like: Elephants.

Yellow. No spaces. And now what I really want; I want to use my primary email address here. But if I hit Save, WordPress is gonna tell me that there already is a user with that email address, so you need to use an alternate email address at this stage. We will later change this account back to the email address that you want it to be.

Please make this a real email address, because if something happens and you want to be able to retrieve the password, you’re gonna need access to that email address. So, hopefully you have more than one email address available to you.

OK. Password’s always required. I always use LastPass to generate my extra-long passwords.

And here’s the role. Very important that we make this an administrator. That’s the whole point here. We’re getting rid of your old administrator account and creating a new one.

OK. I am not sending the password via email. I don’t like sending passwords via email. Anything you write on email; it’s like writing it on the back of a postcard and putting it in the mail. So, I have made note of this password, hopefully. And we’re gonna click Add User here.

And now we have two administrators. One, of course, has all my posts, and one has no posts at all. And I am currently logged in to the Admin username. It’s hard to tell right here. Oh, here we go. When we mouse over it, it tells us the username is Admin.

We need to log out of Admin, because we cannot delete the username Admin while we’re in Admin. So, out we go. Log in with our newly created administrator account.

And we’re gonna return to All Users. And so this is the account Elephantsyellow that we are logged in to now. And this is the Admin account that we want to delete. So, we click Delete. And this is a very important step here. We want to attribute all content to our newly created administrator account.

If you have other users on the account, you will see them here, so you need to make sure that you’re moving content from one admin account to another.

OK. So, now we just have the one administrator. All our posts are there. We’re gonna go back into our profile and do two more things.

First, we’re going to choose a nickname. And this is what’s gonna be publicly displayed. And we’re gonna use a nickname that’s not our user name. It’s not our first and last name. And sometimes I even like to be a little cutesy here and use the nickname Admin. You cannot log in with a nickname, so anyway, you can just pick a nickname that you want to be publicly displayed as. And this is a way of keeping your username private. It can also keep your first and last name private, if that’s what you like. But the important thing here is that the display name and the nickname are different from your username.

We have one last thing to do here, and that is to correct the email address that we used for our new administrator account. Remember we had to use a secondary email address? We could not use this email address because it was already being used for our Admin. So, this is the point where we change it back to the email address that we want and the update profile is at the bottom of the page.

And that is it. If this was helpful, please let me know in the comments and also please fill out a form on WordHer.com and let me know what topics you want me to cover next.

Thanks for listening.