How to Change WordPress Username?

As we all know that nowadays majority blogs on the web are powered by WordPress. This is because WordPress is the most flexible content management system until now. To access the admin panel of your site, you have to enter your Username and password you’ve selected while installing WordPress.

Change WordPress Username

Sometimes it happens that you want to change the username in WordPress but it’s not allowing you to change. Recently, My Username for this site was so simple and I thought that let’s do an experiment to change WordPress username and successfully changed also. Here is video and if you want text tutorial then proceed further…

So, How to Change WordPress Username?

I hope that you know that WordPress uses a MySQL database to store the data on the website. WordPress also stores Usernames and Passwords of registered users in the MySQL database. So, you can’t change the username from WordPress admin panel. To change your WordPress username, You have to visit phpMyAdmin. You can visit phpMyAdmin from the cPanel of your hosting provider.

Just click on phpMyAdmin from your cPanel and then it will be redirected to phpMyAdmin. If you are a geek like me and not using any cPanel based hosting then you know where you can access phpMyAdmin.

phpMyAdmin

In the left sidebar of phpMyAdmin, you will get the list of the databases. Click on the database you are currently using for your site. After selecting the database, you will get the list of the tables you have on your database.

In the list of tables, you will get the table named wp_users which contains the login and contact information of every user of your site. In the list of tables in the database, you will get the table named wp_users in which you will get login and contact information about registered users of your site.

If you are the only registered user of the site you will see the only single entry of yours and you can simply edit that, In my case, I have many users, so I will look for mine and edit that only.

Edit User in phpMyAdmin

You can see that the user_login row shows usernames of the corresponding user. Currently in my test scenario username is admin.

wp_users Table

Now, the last thing you have to do is to change your username and save the record.

Enter the new username replacing old ones, and to save it come down and click on Go button with a default selected options. If Save is not the default option then select Save from the dropdown menu then click the Go button.

Now you have successfully changed the WordPress username.

Note: Don’t try to change the password from here because here your password is encrypted. If you will try to change then it may harm your whole site.

Final Words

By this method, you can successfully change your WordPress username. You can also change the usernames of other registered users if they want.

Category: .

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Responses

  1. Ravi Chahar Avatar
    Ravi Chahar

    Hi Atul, Glad to see that you are showing people about WordPress and changes.

    I like the way you have explained the changing of username. You have made it so simple for users by taking screenshots. Though most of bloggers don’t prefer to change username but still they should know about it.

    Great tutorial indeed. :)

    1. AtulHost Avatar

      Thanks Ravi. Keep visiting us for more updates.

  2. Khasrang Avatar
    Khasrang

    And what about changing the password is it the same way?

    1. AtulHost Avatar

      Don’t ever try to change password this way. Because you can change it directly from admin panel. The password you will get in Database will be encrypted.

      I will not recommend doing this but if you want to know how to change the password from there, just set function as MD5 then type in your password and hit Go.

  3. Javier Olivo Avatar
    Javier Olivo

    I never thought anybody might have such problem, but now I can believe this. By the way, I know an easier way to change username of WordPress blog.

    1. Create a new user with new username.
    2. Change it to Administrator.
    3. Login into new account.
    4. Go to list of users and click on Delete user old user that you want to change.
    5. You will have option to transfer the post written by previous user.
    6. Select Author with new username, and delete.

    Enjoy.

    1. AtulHost Avatar

      Hey, Javier Olivo. Thanks to comment here. Your suggested method is good but it requires many more steps to make it look like as the first one thus I have not recommended it. By your method, a user has to add more information to the new user as username, social links, bio lines and more. If I’m not wrong then you can’t delete first admin of any WordPress site. Just try it. WordPress will not allow you to delete first admin.