Changing WordPress login username

How to change your WordPress login username

Last updated on December 15, 2009. Tags: database, phpMyAdmin

Your WordPress adminstrator username is one of the few things that you can never change (or at least, WordPress tells you). When you log-in to your dashboard and visit your profile, the field containing your username is grayed out and written besides it, "Your username cannot be changed."

The usual (default) administrator username of WordPress is "admin". When you install WordPress using Fantastico, you can have some other username during the installation but once the installation process is finished, you cannot change it through your dashboard.

You can change your WordPress login username. However, the method that I will discuss here can be risky if you're not familiar with manipulating MySQL database tables. This method is very simple but you might want to back-up your database if this is the first time you will be doing this.

The first thing you need to do is to access the database of your WordPress through phpMyAdmin. The icon below (encircled in red) is what you need to click to open phpMyAdmin if you are using CPanel to manage your hosting. If you're using something else other than CPanel, I'm pretty sure there must be a way to access your database, but it's up to you to figure it out.

Once you logged-in to phpMyAdmin, you will be able to see a list of the databases that you use throughout your site. Click on the one that you use for your WordPress blog or website.

phpmyadmin database list

If you do not know the database that your WordPress use, you can check the final (and auxillary) section of this post.

list of wordpress tables

After you open the database, you will see on the left side a list of all tables under that database. Open the table wp_users and click on the browse tab on top of the interface.

database browse tab

After clicking the browse tab, you will see a table containing user login, user pass, user nicename (this should probably be nickname), etc. Click on the pencil-like icon to open the interface where you can edit any of these (do not under any circumstance edit your password here, you can edit it in WordPress dashboard anyway).

Clicking the pencil icon will deliver you to an interface similar to the one shown below.

change interface

Simply change the "admin" (or whatever your initial username is) in the user login row and click Go.

Why would I need to change my WordPress administrator username?

Aside from having anything you want as your username, the use of "admin", since it is the default, makes it easier for hackers to open your blog. They can simply guess that your username is "admin" and use brute password cracking software to open your blog. However if your username is NOT "admin", guessing it will be much more difficult.

I do not know which database runs my WordPress

If you don't know which one runs your WordPress site, open your file manager and open the folder where you installed WordPress (this is the main folder if your entire site runs in WordPress, or a subdomain/folder if you operate your blog as just a subsection of your main site). Here, you should find wp-config.php file. Open this file and you will find a line similar to:

define('DB_NAME', 'domain_database');

In this example, the domain_database is the name of the database. Whatever string you find in your wp-config.php in the same place is the name of your database. Just look for the similar name in the list of databases in phpMyAdmin.

Posted by Greten on September 21, 2009 under Server Configuration, WordPress tweaks

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