published Tuesday, April 16th, 2013 at 10:32 am by
Binoy Koonammavu
WordPress is a preferred blogging as well as web platform for millions of people / organizations across the world. WordPress is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this month. With the recent botnet attacks on WordPress websites, this article would help you in changing the “admin” username.
In the initial days of WordPress, it did not allow users to change the default “admin” username during the installation. However, from version 3.0 of WordPress you could choose a custom username instead of the default “admin”. However, many of us used to choose the bad old “admin” username as the default username.
One of the first thing a hacker try when they want to access a WordPress site is to use the username “admin”. So lets change it. Now, the challenge is that WordPress would not allow you to change the username, so we will have to use a work around to achieve this.
Here is the step by step process for changing the WordPress admin username
1. Login to your WordPress site as Administrator user
2. Create a new user account using the WordPress dashboard
3. Create the new user account adding relevant information
You cannot create another user with the same email address. If you want to use the same email address, then repeat this process once again after deleting the current WordPress user account.
Also ensure that you have selected the administrator role for the new user created.
4. Logout from the current session
5. Login to your WordPress site using the newly created administrator account
6. Go to the “All Users” in the “Users” menu. Here you will find both administrator accounts.
7. Delete the “admin” user account. It will give you the below message
Click on the “Confirm Deletion” button.
This will delete your default administrator account. It will transfer all posts to your newly created user account thus you will have the control on all those posts you created earlier.
Do not forget to use a strong password for your newly created administrator account. Use some of the best password managers for storing the passwords, if you deal with a lot of passwords.
