By default wordpress installations set the administration account username to “admin”. For security reasons, it is a good idea to change it to something hard to guess or something unique.  This username has full backend administration rights and if this account is compromised then you could pretty much lose your entire blog. Wordpress doesn’t allow users to modify this username directly through dashboard user options.

Greyed out in dashboard

However, if you have access to your Mysql databases then you can modify the username very easily. You can accomplish this by using  “Phpmyadmin”, which is offered by most web hosts. Once you access the phpmyadmin page, find your wordpress database. If you haven’t changed the default database tables then it should usually end with   “_wrdp1”. Click on your wordpress database.

Find your database

Once you have selected the database, Look for a table called “wp_users”.  Then click on the “browse” button or the very first icon right next to the table.

Find wp_users table and click browse icon

When you click “browse” it will give you options to edit the table. Find the user login called “admin” and click on the pencil icon to edit fields.

Click on the pencil to edit

Once you have clicked “edit”, you would be presented with options to change different fields. Just change the admin username to whatever you want. Make sure you choose something hard to guess. Then click “Go”. At this point everything should be saved and you can exit out of phpmyadmin.

Change username and press GO

Now if you log back in with your new username then you will see your new admin account username in greyedout area.

Caution: Phpmyadmin is a very powerful tool. If you’re not sure what you are doing then don’t experiment with databases or tables in it. You could potentially ruin your blog.

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