How to Change WordPress Post Authors
If your website has multiple authors, it is possible that you may want to change the authors of some special articles to someone others. Regularly, you may need to copy and paste the whole blog post with a totally different author. This time, we’d like to introduce the relatively easier methods of how to change WordPress post authors.
Here, we need to note that you do not need to install any extra plugin for doing so. Instead, the default WordPress features and functions can help you achieve this goal with ease. In addition, to prevent some unexpected situations, we highly recommend you to make a full backup of your website before changing the post authors.
Change WordPress Post Authors for the Single Article
If you want to change the author for a single blog post, you firstly need to enter its editing screen. Here, from the upper right section, you can find the Screen Options button. You need to click it and tick the checkbox of Authors among a bunch of selections.
Now, you should scroll down to the bottom section of this screen. Here, you can find the special Author box. You just need to click the drop-down menu for selecting your target author.
After that, you need to remember to click the Update button to save the changes you have made to the post author.
Change WordPress Post Authors for Multiple Articles in Bulk
Surely, it is easy and time-saving to change the post author for the single article. However, if you are looking to make these changes for multiple blog posts, the manual method may take you a lot of time. Luckily, WordPress has a bulk action feature that allows you to change the post authors in a bulk manner.
Here, you simply need to click the Posts tab and then hit the All Posts button from your WordPress admin. This way, all your blog posts can be listed here.
Now, you can click the posts that you are looking to change the authors. Here, we need to note that the default WordPress settings only showcases 20 posts in each page. In this case, if your target posts are split into different pages, you can click the Screen Options button and check the Pagination section. Here, you can change the number of posts displayed per page.
Next, after checking the boxes of your target articles in one time, you can click the Edit button from the drop-down menu of Bulk Actions. And then, you need to press the Apply button.
Now, you can start the bulk editing of these selected posts to choose their categories, tags, authors, comments, status, pings and sticky settings. This time, you simply need to pay attention to the Author metabox and choose your wanted author from the drop-down list.
We have to admit that this method saves your work and efforts a lot, without the need to open up, edit and update the single blog post one by one. However, it takes the freedom away for you to assign different authors to different posts. In this case, when choosing between these two methods, you’d better make the decision on your real needs.
How to Fix Custom Fields Not Showing in WordPress
Additional information can be added to your posts and pages with the advance WordPress feature – custom fields. But they fail to show on your post editor, which might be an issue you face now. Everything seems to work as usual but what’s wrong with your custom fields. This article, written by our experienced editors, comes with a detailed guidance on how to fix custom filed not showing in WordPress.
What are Custom Fields?
Custom fields can be a part of WordPress pages, posts, or custom content type: Rating for a product, music, or anything else. By default, two different areas, one is post editor and the other is metadata, are used for your content. Post editor is an area for the body while metadata is about particular content, such as, date and time, author name, etc.
In addition to the default metadata, WordPress provides the freedom to store custom post metadata with the use of custom fields. The Yoast SEO plugin is a typical example using custom fields.
Fix Custom Fields Not Showing in WordPress
When editing a post or after updating your WordPress, you might wonder why custom fields are gone from your WordPress site. Especially, beginners will have the trouble finding the custom fields option. Take it easy, because things are much easier than imagined.
There was a time when custom fields remained visible on the post edit screen. With the passage of time, however, WordPress believes it is better to hide this advance feature for new users. Also, WordPress does allow all the users to make custom fields visible within few clicks.
WordPress has a ‘Screen Options’ button which is at the top right corner of the post screen. With a click on that, users will have the options to disable or enable some sections, such as, categories, tags, featured images, custom fields, and many more options.
Note: Under the default text editor will also include the options your themes and plugins come along with.
Among the options, the Custom Fields section is likely to remain unchecked. This is the top reason why custom fields fail to show on the post editor screen. Thus the box next to ‘Custom Fields’ should be checked to enable the function.
It is appreciated that you have fixed custom fields not showing in WordPress without taking much time and energy. To be honest, the error can be fixed in a super easy way.
Now, you have the freedom to add extra metadata in the Custom Fields section. This can be down below your post editor.
No Custom Fields Option?
Under normal circumstances, the custom fields option can be found from the screen options. However, such is not the case with one of our readers. Having the question received, we make a decision to find how to fix that.
After our research, the default custom fields will come back to your WordPress site with the below code.
There are some instances where you are afraid to mess up your website with code snippets. Then the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin is a great alternative which enables you to create custom meta boxes.
How to NoFollow a Link Inserted in Post
Sharing a link on your post or page is equivalent to giving SEO points to that link. This means that whenever you include a link into your post, some SEO points are transferred from your site to that link. This is a fruitful linking strategy if you share your internal links, but is a poor idea in terms of external ones.
In this case, a nofollow tag can come into utilization for it restricts a search engine from offering any link juice to an external site. Besides, this practice can tell searching spiders that this is an outside link that does not need to be crawled and indexed.
Insert Nofollow Tag Manually
The manual inserting of nofollow tag can be achieved by using the following coding.
Sample Link Anchor Text
Therefore, when you edit your post in the Text Editor of WordPress, you can use this line of code to make your external link a nofollow one. However, this way is not suitable to a bulk-sharing of external links as it is a time-consuming step. Therefore, you can also refer to the second method for an automatic inserting.
Use Rel Nofollow Checkbox to Add Nofollow Checkbox
As WordPress offers a lot of plugins to achieve different goals, this time, you can take the assistance of the Rel Nofollow Checkbox plugin. This plugin is used by millions of WordPress developers and is one of the most effective tools for nofollow functionality.
Upon the successful installation and activation, this plugin configures automatically on your WordPress site. Now, you should navigate to the post editing screen. Here, you should choose the Visual Editor and click on the Create Link button.
Then, you can notice that a nofollow checkbox has been added to the existing option. This checkbox is generally available below the “Open link in a new window/tab”. You can choose both of them at the time of adding an external link to a post. This way, the link can be opened in a new window and does not share your linking juice.
Now, whenever you create a new post, you can link to an external page without transferring your SEO points. Moreover, you are not required to switch your editing screen to Visual Editor repeatedly to insert the rel=nofollow tag. You can create a post containing links to external sites and mark the nofollow checkbox conveniently through the Insert Link section to keep your link juice intact.
Slug of WordPress Post
If you are new to the WordPress script, there are a lot of basic elements you need to learn and master for the effective utilization, such as the permalink structure, visual editor, attachments, featured image and many more. This time, we’d like to introduce a new term – WordPress slug, telling you what the slug is on earth along with some tips for optimizing it.
Definition of WordPress Slug
In fact, the slug is just a few words that can be used to describe the main content of a page or a blog post in the permalink. By default, WordPress will generate the slug automatically for your posts or pages based on the content title. However, to make it as URL friendly as possible, you generally need to modify the slug in a manual way.
For instance, in this post, the default slug will be “beginner-guide-on-wordpress-slug”. To better optimize it, you can change the slug to “wordpress-slug” directly.
In addition, the WordPress slug can make sense only when you enable the “postname” option in the permalink settings.
Where Will the Slug Appear in Your WordPress Site?
Now, you need to figure out where these slugs will appear in your WordPress powered websites. In the common situations, there are 4 locations.
Blog Posts and Webpages
These are surely the most obvious options. As you can see in our previous example, this special system will generate the slug for each of your post and page right after you enter the title into the title box. If you are not satisfied with the slug, you have the freedom to edit, and then, save your preferred version before hitting the publish button.
Tags and Categories
These two options also allow you to have the slug created. Each time you create a new tag or a new category, you must enter the name and type your wanted slug that is in the lower case and is integrated using dashes but not the spaces.
How to Optimize Your WordPress Slug?
There is an interesting situation that almost all the WordPress components can be further optimized for the higher degree of effectiveness and efficiency. The slug, surely, is not an exception.
With this in mind, we are going to list some useful tips telling you how to optimize your WordPress slug to achieve the best page structure, reading experience and the search engine optimization.
Use Some SEO Keywords into the Slug
First of all, it would be better for you to include some keywords into your slug. Especially, if you already enter the keywords into your post titles and meta descriptions, this practice can triple the effects of SEO optimization.
Simplify Your WordPress Slug
In most cases, the slug is created as a complementary item to your current permalink structure that already includes your domain name, or even has the publishing date of the blog content, content category and post name.
Due to this, you need to make your slug as simple and short as possible using some specific words that can fully describe what you have said in the content. This can make both real readers and search engines feel easy to read and understand your link.
Never Use the Same Slug In More Than One Time
When managing your WordPress site, have you ever found that some of your categories, posts, tags and pages have the number “2” or others attached to the end of the URLs? If so, it means you have duplicated your WordPress slugs. As WordPress does not allow the same slug to appear in more than one time, it will leave an ugly number in the URLs.
Personally speaking, this can hurt your SEO to some degrees and can devastate your whole professionalism and authority in a specific field. In this case, you need to try your best to avoid the slug replication.
If this happens, you can fix the issue simply by changing the offending slug. If the posts are closely related, the modification can be minor.
After doing so, if this problem still happens, you should check your trash box to figure out whether the deleted posts have the offending slug. If so, you need to delete them permanently.
Make the Slug Highly Relevant to the Main Content
We have found that many webmasters sacrifice the aspect of relevancy and only seek for the simplicity and the inclusion of keywords. This is totally wrong. You can cut and change some words from the default slug, but the prerequisite is that your slug can fully cover your web content.
Do Not Change the Slug After Publishing
This can be a stupid mistake that might be made by some newcomers. In fact, if you publish a post or a page, and then, change the slug, this means you have altered the URL. In this case, the link directing your readers to the right content will be broken, and the 404 error occurs. Note that broken links can result in the loss of online ranking and organic traffic.
Due to this, you’d better avoid the change of slug after content publishing. However, in some cases, you may need to do this. If so, the redirection practice cannot be ignored.
You can finish the redirection by editing the .htaccess file or using the plugin. Personally, we recommend the later option. This time, you can try the Redirection plugin.
To add the new redirection, you should click Tools > Redirection. After that, you can enter the source URL, choose the action of “Redirect to URL” and type the target one. After clicking the Add Redirect button, you can fix the error even if you have changed the slug of a published post.
