Change the Author of a Post in WordPress Classic Editor and Gutenberg
There are certain situations when you want to change the author of your post without having to copy and paste the entire content in a new post with a new author name. The author is one of the main user roles in WordPress so it’s very important to get it right for each of your posts. Whatever your reasons for changing the author, you’ll be glad to know that it’s very easy to do, both in the Classic Editor and in the new Gutenberg one:
To change the author of a post in the Classic Editor, log into your WordPress Dashboard and click on the post you want to change the author for.
Next, go to Screen Options, in the upper right portion of the editor, and make sure the Author box is checked.
Now, scroll down and find the Author field. Open it and select the author you want from the menu.
Don’t forget to save changes by clicking the Update button.
The procedure for changing the author of a post in the new WordPress Gutenberg editor is somewhat different. In the new editor, you no longer go to Screen Options and proceed from there. Instead, the author-related options are located within the post itself, in the Document tab, which is definitely quicker and more convenient.
If you want to change the author in WordPress really quickly, without actually entering the post in question, you can do so by hovering over the post and clicking on Quick Edit.
The Author menu will open up, where you can change the author of that one specific post.
This procedure is the same both for the Classic Editor and for the Gutenberg users.
If you want to change the author for more than one previously published post, go to All Posts, select the posts, go to Bulk Actions – Edit, and then click on Apply.
Select the new author here.
Finally, don’t forget to click on Update to apply the changes.
This step is completely the same both for the Classic Editor users and for those using the new Gutenberg editor.
Conclusion
As you can see, it’s very easy to change the author of one specific post or several different posts in WordPress, regardless of the type of editor you’re using. As usual, WordPress offers several different options, and it’s totally up to you which one you’re going to use. Now that you know how to change the author in WordPress, we are sure your website is going to run even smoother than before.
We hope that you found this article to be helpful. If you liked it, please feel free to check out some of these articles as well!
Joe
You need to update this post, Gutenberg no longer has the option to change author name 🙁
Ana Hercigonja
Hi, Joe. Thanks for the comment. We just checked, and in the latest version of WordPress (5.1.1) we still have the option of changing the post author while using Gutenberg. Please note that you need to have multiple WordPress users/authors created in order for the option to show up in the Document tab (or in Quick Edit). We hope this helps. 🙂
Herve
Hi,
Strange, I have an administrator account and an editor account, before I could choose between the two accounts.
For a few weeks now, I haven’t had the option.
Thank you
Ana Hercigonja
Hi Herve,
Thank you for reaching out. If I understand correctly, you are currently unable to switch authors in your posts?
There are two possibilities here. Either the Author box in Screen Options is unchecked (in which case you should just click on Screen Options in the upper right corner and check the Author box) or one of the users has been deleted.
As for the accounts, each user logs in with their own username and password. To switch to another account, you have to log out and log back in with different credentials.
If this is not what you were referring to, please get back to us and we’ll figure it out 🙂
Mark
Perhaps worth noting that if you’re importing posts from another blog, when it recreates the users, it will set them to the default access level as newly registered users (by default this is ‘subscriber’).
Subsequently, if you try to change the owner of a post to any of these newly created users, they won’t show up in the list of users to allocate posts to. In order to do that, you’ll need to change their access level to a role that can post. With the default user roles, the lowest role that will have this access is ‘contributor’.
Ana Hercigonja
Thanks Mark!