When you first load the wordpress software onto your domain, unless you specify otherwise, the default login user name will be set to ‘admin’.

From a security perspective, this weakens the security of your blog as it is one less piece of information for a hacker to crack in order to gain access.

I always thought that it would be difficult to change this once you had set everything up – but in fact it is really easy. Here are the simple steps to follow to change your admin wordpress name:  (If you operate a forum on your site – please refer to the note at the bottom BEFORE you start)

  1. Login into your wp-admin as normal.
  2. In the lefthand dashboard menu, open up ‘Users’ & click on ‘Add New’
  3. Create a new user, choosing a suitable user name (this will become you main admin login in the future), making sure that you use the drop down menu at the bottom next to role & select ‘Administrator’
  4. Logout
  5. Log back in using the new user details you have created
  6. Again from the lefthand menu, open up ‘Users’
  7. Hover over the user ‘Admin’ & select ‘delete’ which will appear underneath
  8. Check the box ‘Attribute all posts’ & in the drop down file, select the new user you have just created (this will transfer all posts, links etc that you have previously created under admin over to the new user name)
  9. Confirm deletion

Thats it, all done.

By the way – an important note for website owners who also run a forum on their site.  BEFORE you delete your ‘admin’ user, check & see if the forum is linked to it (either generally with admin rights or posts).  If so, you will need to reassign everything to the new user logon BEFORE you delete ‘admin’

Happy blogging.

P.S One last thing I recommend is to make use of the ‘nickname’ & ‘display publicly as’ options within the user profile so that they are different to your chosen user login name.