How to change Wordpress’ default username
After each installation, Wordpress gives you a deafult “admin” username and a random password to login to your control panel. Try to login with them and access your profile by clicking the “Profile” link on the top right section of the page.
The profile page displays your user information such as your username, e-mail, and login password. You can easily change the password, but what about that username? Why do we want to change it anyway? Well, having a username as common as “admin” is not quite secure, not to mention hundreds if not thousands of other Wordpress bloggers use it as their login too.
Unfortunately, Wordpress doesn’t make it possible to change the username from the control panel. Yes, it is visible but no, it is locked for editing. To change it, you’ll have to access the database and do it from there.
Here are the steps on how to change Wordpress’ default username:
1. Login to your host’s control panel and access the MySQL database
In your web host control panel, you’ll find a link that goes to the database administration. On that page you’ll find a link to phpMyAdmin. Go and click it. Some web hosts might even have the link to phpMyAdmin directly on the control panel’s front page. After clicking the link you may or may not be presented by a login form. Enter your database login information to continue.
Your can see your database information in the “wp-cofig.php” file located in the root directory of your Wordpress installation.
2. Open your Wordpress database tables
On the left side of the screen, you’ll see a list of database. Find and click your Wordpress database. After you clicked it, the page will display the database tables, which stores all information about your Wordpress blog. Find the table named “wp_users“. This table holds information about users; e-mails, passwords, and of course usernames!
After you’ve located it, you need to browse it’s content. Along the table’s row you’ll see a series of action icons. Find the one that reads Browse. You can usully hover your mouse over the icon to see what action it wil do. Click it. On the screenshot below, Browse is the first icon after “wp_users”.
3. Open and edit the username
After clicking the Browse action, the page will display all users registered to your blog. If you happen to be a single user or just installed Wordpress, there will be only one admin user row. In the row’s heading you will see the user ID and next to it the user_login. This is the information that we want to edit. To do that, click on the Edit icon. On the screenshot below, it is the one next to the trash icon.
You will then enter the table edit screen. Find the field that reads user_login that change its value to whatever you want your username will be. For example, I changed it from ‘admin’ to ’simba’. After you’ve typed the new user_login, hit the Go button located at the bottom of the page.
That’s it. You can test your new username by refreshing your profile page in your Wordpress control panel. It will bounce you back to the login screen with a big red box stating your session has expired.
Now login with your new username. Fill in your password and hit the Login button. If you got it right, you should be back in the control panel.
Go to the profile page again. There you have it, your new username.
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