Method 1: Manually Remove Author Name from WordPress Posts

Your WordPress theme decides when and how to display the author name in your blog posts. Themes use multiple approaches to do that which makes it harder for a plugin to provide a generic solution for removing author names.

You will need to edit some code to prevent your theme from displaying the author name. If you are uncomfortable editing code, then try the second method instead.

The first method requires you to edit WordPress theme files.

Note: Make sure that you create backup of your theme or child theme before making any changes. If something goes wrong, then this will help you easily revert changes.

WordPress themes use different variations of code to display the author name. You will need to locate the code responsible for showing the author’s name in your theme files and delete it.

Most common locations to find this code are single.php, content.php, archive.php, and index.php files.

In many cases, you will not be able to find the code that outputs author name. Instead, you will find a template tag defined in the functions.php file or template-tags.php file.

For example, the default Twenty Nineteen theme uses the function twentynineteen_posted_by to display author name. This function is defined in template-tags.php file and uses the following code:

Once you have located the code that outputs the author name, you need to delete it.

For example, you have to delete the code from the second line to the ninth line in the above code. After that, the remaining code will look like below.

Don’t forget to save your changes after deleting the author name code. Then, upload the files back to your website.

You can now visit your website to see your changes in action:



This method hides the author name on all your posts; however, the author archive pages will remain intact. An author archive page is where WordPress creates a list of all articles written by a specific user.

You can find author archive page on a URL like this:

https://example.com/author/samsmith/

This URL is discoverable by search engines, which means you may still get traffic to those pages.

You can disable the author archives easily using the Yoast SEO plugin. Once you install and activate the plugin, go to SEO » Search Appearance your dashboard and then click the ‘Archives’ tab.

Now you can see the author archive settings. You can toggle Author Archives switch and disable author archives on your site.



Doing so will disable author archives and hide author-sitemap.xml file created by the Yoast SEO plugin.