There are many ways to install a WordPress script on your server or hosting. The easiest way for a beginner is by using Softaculous or other similar software. Luckily, I’ve wrote a detailed tutorial about installing WordPress using Softaculous long time ago.
If you use Softaculous (or similar software) and has already changed the ‘admin’ username prior to installing WordPress, you’re not going to need this tutorial.
Why We Need to Change the Default ‘admin’ Username?
For security reason. WordPress has powered millions of websites and everyone knows that ‘admin’ is the default WordPress username. Why is this so bad to use it?
Using the ‘admin’ username is bad as it will make it easier for anyone to break into your site using the brute-force method. However, you might say that using a strong password with a combination of big and small letters, number and special character are good enough and yes you’re right. The attacker might have to take a longer time to hack into your site. However, from my experience, in most of the times, those who are using ‘admin’ as username are also using a really bad and easy password such as ‘admin123′, ‘password’, ’123456′ and etc.
Let’s see the username distribution on the mass brute-force attack at WordPress site recently (credit image to Sucuri.net) :
As clearly shown on the chart, the attackers were trying to brute-force WordPress sites around the worlds using the ‘admin’ username more than 1 million times. That’s a lot.
Change the Default ‘admin’ username
To change the default ‘admin’ username, just follow these simple steps:
1. Change your email address from the profile page. For example, if your current is [email protected], change it to another email address (perhaps your secondary email address).
2. Create a new user profile. Use back the old email (ie [email protected]) and give it another username.
3. Set the role of the new profile as administrator.
4. Log and login with the new profile.
4. Delete the old profile.
I found this to be the easiest way to change the username in WordPress. In WordPress, once you’ve chosen a username, it cannot be changed forever. However we can change the email address associated with the account and with some trick I mentioned above, you can get rid of the ‘admin’ username.
Leave a Reply