Changing your Wordpress Admin Username

2008 July 24
by George

Changing your Wordpress username to something other than admin is reportedly a good way to help stave off brute force or dictionary attacks, where the hacker already knows your username and is only trying for your password.

It can be done by opening up PHPmyAdmin, going to the users table, and locating the user_login column. If you change that, your wordpress username will change.

Note - you should backup your database before attempting this, just in case. Do not attempt this unless you are confident that you know what you are doing - if in doubt, get someone to do it for you.

1 Comment leave one →
2008 July 25

Another alternative would be to simply create a new user with the desired username, add Administrator privileges to the account and then simply transfer the ownership of your posts from the standard “Admin” default, to the new account. This is a simpler fool-proof alternative that I’ve used in the past, and it doesn’t require going into phpmyadmin. To be fair, Neither of these options are a good idea for blogs with more than one author.

-DK

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