How to Remove Author from WordPress Posts? Methodical process for Beginners

Author’s identity and description are really important metadata to represent any blog’s identity. In fact, these are the first impression for our readers. By default, posts can be distinguished and categorized based on author metadata, creation and modification date. However, in some instances, you might have the necessity of removing these metadata. In cases, when you want the published article to be named under the website company and not the individual or keep the author’s identity closed, you may want to remove author from WordPress posts. As per your wish, you can either generalize hide or or remove author from WordPress posts. So, in this chapter, we will be discussing the methods to change the status of an author from WordPress posts.

Methods to remove author from WordPress posts

You can remove author from WordPress posts in the following three ways. All these methods are fully instructional and solely based on beginners guidelines.

• Removing Author’s name from blog posts using a plugin.
• Removing Author’s name in WordPress Posts Manually.
• Creating generic Author name for every blog posts.

Method 1: Removing Author’s name from blog posts using a plugin

One of the most recommended methods to remove author from WordPress posts is by using a plugin. This is an easy method if you are a beginner. However, it’s working feasibility is not guaranteed with all kinds of available themes.

Let’s start the process:

First, you need to install and activate the plugin. For this demonstration, I’ve used the Show Hide Author Plugin. If you are a beginner and have a problem with installing the plugin, check our step by step process in the previous blog: How to install a WordPress plugin

After the activation of the plugin, let’s go to Plugins>>Show Hide Author page to configure plugin settings. To remove author from WordPress post, just uncheck the Posts checkbox.

The plugin will then hides the author name. But, your WordPress theme may still show the accompanying text before the author name, like ‘by Beautiful Themes Editor’ would now display just “by”.

However, this “by” can be easily removed. To remove it, go to your website and take the mouse over to the text you want to hide and with right-click, select Inspect from your browser menu. Copy the “byline” shortcode. It is presented in a “<span>” tag and “byline class”.

 

You can now go ahead and paste the parent class on the Advanced: Hide the “by” word from Plugins>>Show/Hide Author. Save the changes you made and after you are done.

Finally, you will be able to see your posts without the author’s name.

Method 2: Remove Author name in WordPress Posts Manually

Did you know we can also remove author from WordPress posts manually? However, for this method, you will be requiring some basic knowledge in coding. If that’s ok for you, you can also edit your WordPress theme files by this process.

All you need to do is find the code that exhibits the Author’s name in your theme and remove it. Go to Appearance>>Editor and look over a template tag defined in the template-tags.php file in the inc section.

For example, the default Cenote theme uses the function cenote_posted_by on to display author name and post date/time and here the function is defined in the template-tags.php file.

function cenote_posted_by() {
$byline = sprintf(
'%s',
'<span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="' . esc_url( get_author_posts_url( get_the_author_meta( 'ID' ) ) ) . '">' . esc_html( get_the_author() ) . '</a></span>'
);

echo '<span class="byline"> ' . $byline . '</span>'; // WPCS: XSS OK.

Now, you need to remove the code that outputs the author name.

if ( ! function_exists( 'cenote_posted_by' ) ) :

* Prints HTML with meta information for the current author.

function cenote_posted_by() {

}endif 

Lastly, save your changes and upload the files back to your website. Then, you can visit your website to see that the author’s name is no longer mentioned.

Method 3: Creating a generic Author name for every blog posts

This method can be an alternative to remove author from WordPress posts if you want to create a general name of author for every published blog posts. This can be used if you want to give authorization for every post published to the company and is sensitive to present author’s identity in posts. One of the flaws of this process is that this is an irreversible process. For reverting changes you have to go to each post and change the name of author individually. So, here we go.

Step 1: Adding a New User

First, you have to go to Users section in the WordPress dashboard and add a new author to your WordPress site by giving a generic username. Here, we chose Author

Secondly, let’s move to Users » All Users page and then click on the ‘Edit’ button below the new username which you have just added.

And now, you will get to see the profile screen of all added user. After that, scroll to ‘nickname’ option and type the name which you want to be displayed. Then, click on the drop-down menu which is beside to  ‘Display name publicly as’ option and select the nickname you had just entered.

Since you have a new user account, you can easily add a bio for that account. Now go to Posts >> All Posts page and click on the screen options menu which is at the top. Enter the number of items you want to display which lies within three digit number i.e 999.

Step 2: Bulk Editing the Author

With this, you can quickly edit and change author name for posts in bulk. Select all posts using the checkbox and then choose edit under the bulk actions drop-down menu. And then, click on the ‘Apply’ button to proceed.

 

Now, you will be shown bulk editing options. Here, you need to change the name of the author to the generic author name which you just added and then click on Update button.

All the selected posts will be updated with the changed author name. One thing to remember here is the speed of this process depends on how fast your WordPress hosting is. If you have more than 999 posts, you need to go through page 2 and go on repeating the process.

Finally, you’ll see the changes in your website once you visit it.

Wrapping Up Note

So here we have all the methods on how to remove author from WordPress posts. Consider any method which meets your needs. I do think that you’ll be able to do it from any method according to your knowledge of coding, plugins or the WordPress theme itself.

I hope this information is helpful to you. We will also recommend you some of our interesting blog posts:

• How to Remove Date from WordPress Posts? Step-by-Step for Beginners
• A Comprehensive Guide on How to Add a WordPress Chatbot on Your Website
• A Beginner’s Guide on How to Add WordPress Widgets