How to Hide Your WordPress Username from Hackers

hey everyone this is tony teaches tech i'm tony and in this video i'm going to explain to you the importance of hiding your wordpress usernames from the public and i'm also going to show you how to do this so if you think about it when you log into wordpress there's two pieces of information you need one is the username and one is the password we all know that passwords have to be secure and strong but if somebody has your username that's half the battle so we want to do as much as we can to hide your username from being out in the public and unfortunately wordpress does not good does not do a good job of hiding your username it actually makes it very apparent what your username is if you know where to look so let me show you what i mean in this video and like i said also show you how to hide it so here is my travel blog at tonytravels.com and uh there is if you go to any of my blog posts you can click on here and at the top of every post you have the date and the author that made your blog post so the author if you hover over this you'll see that down here in the bottom left hand corner it says author tony and tony happens to be my username for this website so i don't want that information out there there's also another way that you can look up via an api what the username usernames are for any website and that would be to go to the wordpress website go to the domain name slash wp json slash wp slash v2 users and that's going to return this json string if you know what i mean it looks like a whole bunch of garbage but in here is that same information okay so we have uh the author here and tony and that's scattered throughout here so that's my that's again my username for this so we need to do two things in this video we need to prevent anybody from making this query by going to this url we want to block that url pretty much and we want to back here hide the fact that that's my username even though some people might argue that that's a useful page but mine just redirects back to the homepage for now let's go ahead and show you how to do this here is my wordpress admin dashboard and i'm going to use a plugin called perf matters to disable that api so you can get the perfmatters plugin it is a paid plugin but it does have a whole ton of features one of my favorite wordpress plugins and one of those features is disabling the rest api okay so the rest api for for non-admins is the default or actually the default selection is that the rest api is enabled but prior to this video i had disabled it for non-admin so basically because i'm logged into my wordpress account right now i'm able to access that api but let's say if we go to a guest window and go to tony travels dot com and then i'm going to copy and paste this just because it's easier and hit enter anybody else who's not logged into my wordpress is going to get this error message sorry you do not have permission to make rest api requests so all that information right away is gone from anybody trying to access it okay so that takes care of one of those issues the other one is the username link right here so how do we change that well you don't need a plugin for this you can just go to your appearance section and go to the theme editor and i highly recommend you work with a child theme here any any wordpress theme can have a child theme associated with it and i have a video about that if you don't know what i'm talking about but with your child theme selected go to the theme functions functions.php file what we're going to do somewhere in here is add a couple lines of code i'm going to paste that in and explain what that does so basically we're adding a function that returns the about page instead of the author link okay so when when when that page is being generated when the blog post is being generated instead of showing the this link right here the author slash author tony link it'll go to the about page instead and you can change that to whatever url you want so when we update that file go back to our wordpress post refresh the page hover over this now instead of going to the authors page we'll go to the about page instead so if this is not convincing enough for you to change your username i recommend that you check out this video right here which is one of me brute forcing my own wordpress website just to show you how important it is to hide your username and have a strong password i want to thank you guys for watching subscribe for this subscribe to this channel for more videos like this from me in the future and if you do i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Tony Teaches Tech

Views: 1,116

Keywords: wordpress hide username, can i hide my wordpress username, hide wordpress username, how to hide wordpress username

Id: Qn_xlGnpy00

Length: 4min 59sec (299 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 21 2021