A very important step in securing a WordPress site is to remember not to use the name ‘admin’ for the administrator account. Many automatic installers for WordPress will create an admin user as the log in administrative user for the entire site. 

Because of this, hackers have half of their job already done when they’ve guessed that your log in username is ‘admin’. Now they just have to figure out the password. Unfortunately there are thousands of WordPress sites with admin as their main login username. The reason why is unless you are familiar with MySQL and PHPAdmin it can be a very daunting task to change the default username in a WordPress site.

That’s why I’m going to point you to a small little plugin that will do the job for you. Its called Change Admin Username. Now, you’ll have to download it from the site below and save it to your computer. Then upload it through your WordPress Admin interface. Follow these steps and I’ll walk you through the procedure.

1) Go to the following site and download the file change-admin-username.zip to your computer.

http://w-shadow.com/blog/2008/07/24/change-admin-username-in-wordpress/

2) Log into your WordPress admin interface and hover over Plugins on the left sidebar then click Add New

3) Click on Upload, then click on Choose File and find the change-admin-username.zip file on your computer. Click on it and click Open, then click Install Now to upload and install the plugin.

4) Now click Activate next to the Change Admin Username plugin

5) After the plugin is activated, click on the Users section in the left sidebar

6) Click on Change Username

7) Type in the new username in the correct section and click Save Changes

It may take several minutes but the plugin will go through the MySQL database and change the old username to the new username. This will harden the security on your WordPress site and make it more difficult to hack.

For additional security, change the default database prefix as well.

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