Change WordPress Admin Username in 30 Seconds

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I receive almost 15 emails per day alerting me that a user has tried to brute force my blog with the ‘admin’ username.

In this article, I’ll be showing you how to change your WordPress admin username to something more ‘unique’.
If you’ve already attempted to change the username via the WordPress admin, you might have realised that it’s not possible.

Don’t worry, though, it’s an extremely easy process!

Change the WordPress Admin Username via phpMyAdmin (MySQL)

Assuming that you’re logged in to phpMyAdmin, simply follow the below steps to change the WordPress admin username:

  1. Click on your WordPress database
  2. Select the ‘wp_users’ table
  3. Select ‘Edit’ next to the respective user ‘admin’ row
  4. Type a new user in the ‘user_nicename’ field
  5. Click ‘Go’ to apply the new changes
  6. Finished!

Now go back to your WordPress admin panel and login with your new admin username!

As a side note, I’ve performed this on many sites (large and small) with no undesirable impacts.

Let me know how you go in the comments.

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  • http://kobak.org kobak

    And idea for the next post: changing the url of a WordPress install. Which can be painful because the login url redirects to the old one all the time. :)