How to Add an Author Box to Your WordPress Site
Running a successful blog is more than writing high-quality articles. To delight the readers, boost your followers and make money from blogging, you need to build your personal brand. This means you need to be recognized and trusted by both the blogging community and ordinary people interested in your niche. Adding the author box is the first step in building your blog’s brand identity. This is especially important if your blog covers different WordPress post formats, and has many separate topics and authors. In this case, creating one About me page won’t work. Instead, add author box on each post written by a different author. When people know who the author of their favorite text is, they associate the content with an actual person. Moreover, this leads to easier communication and builds stronger boundaries with your blog. Another great thing about this element is the fact it allows you to include your image, title, and a short bio. This can do wonders to your reputation and blog’s credibility. Don’t forget to add your social networks so readers can connect and subscribe with one click. Before you create your new WordPress blog post, take a few minutes to check out some amazing options for adding an author box to your blog.
Essential Author Box Plugins
This simple plugin automatically inserts the author box at the end of your posts. Thanks to it, you can show the author’s name, add the avatar or include a short bio. You can, also, include the author’s website or social networks. In addition, you can customize the author box so it matches your design perfectly – choose color, size or text style. Finally, Simple Author Box plugin will make sure your author box looks great no matter the screen size and device type.
This plugin is made particularly for blog posts, so you won’t be able to use it on the single pages. Now, let’s see what the best way to use this plugin is. After you install it, go to Appearance and find the Author box widget. Now, drag this widget over to the Blog Sidebar area.
Here you can enter the author’s title or Choose author/user. The author box will also appear at the bottom of the post, by default.
If you want to further customize your author box, navigate to Simple Author and click on Simple Author.
Set margins or box padding, choose the border color or select the color of the box background. Don’t forget to choose your favorite font family and font size. After you finish with the customization, you can add the avatar image and the links to the author’s social networks. Simple go to the Users and click on the All Users. Now, find your desired user and add the image and link to social media with a click.
After we finished the customization, our author box looks like this:
Simple Author Box also has a PRO version which sets it apart from similar plugins quite a lot. In this version, you can find a few admirable features.
The first of these features would be assigning guest authors to posts, which takes collaboration and blogging up a notch. On a similar note, with this plugin, you can also assign multiple authors to a post and give them the credit they deserve. Other PRO features include link control, a Gutenberg block, selecting post types where your author box will appear, special color schemes and templates, as well as a “top authors” widget. And as you might have assumed, fast and friendly support is also part of the package.
This plugin is a simple solution for adding the author box to your blog. What is amazing about this plugin is its “auto-detection” option. Basically, this feature can optionally show the author of the current post on single post templates or on certain author archive. Unlike Simple Author Box, this plugin doesn’t have an option for adding links to social networks. When you install it, go to Appearance and click on Widgets. Find Maks Smart Author widget and drug it over to the Blog Sidebar area.
Here you can change the image size and choose a specific author. But what we really like about this plugin is the option that allows you to link the author on a certain page. For instance, you can connect the author with a separate page with more relevant bio information. Unfortunately, this plugin doesn’t support adding the avatar image. In a case you need it, install WP User Avatar plugin and add the user’s image easily.
Basic author box looks like this:
In a case you need the author box that follows your website style, the good news is you can use a simple CSS code to change the author box background. Go to the Appearance, click on Customize and then on Additional Css. As you can see, here you can easily change the background color.
.mks_author_widget {
background-color: #eedfc1;
padding-left:10px;
padding-top:10px;
}
This time we decided to go with #eedfc1. Here you can also set left and top padding. After we have made these small changes in the code, our author box, looks like this:
WordPress Themes with Author Box
Besides the plugins that help you add an author box to your blog with complete ease, there are WordPress themes equipped with this great feature. This means that you can add more information about each author on your website hassle-free. Here are our favorite.
This modern, feature-rich theme is an ideal fit for every travel blogger. Included with the theme are many blog layouts and homepage templates. With this theme, you can place your author box in the blog’s sidebar.
This amazing theme, made particularly for magazines and blogs, comes with all essential features any blogger, writer, journalist or publisher may need. Journo allows you not only to choose from a wide array of layouts but to share your stories with style as well. Here, your author box will be placed under the post and will include the image, short bio and links to social networks.
Let’s sum up
If you plan to start a blog, or already run one, you should definitely consider adding an author box to your posts. With it, you may be sure your articles will be trusted by people who admire your expertise and professional achievements. The good news is you can use simple plugins or themes that come with included author box to share more information about every author on your WordPress site.
We hope this article was helpful. If you liked it, feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
