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9 WordPress Author Bio Plugins for Adding Authority to Your Blog Posts

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9 WordPress Author Bio Plugins for Adding Authority to Your Blog Posts

If you run a website that features more than one author, it can be a challenge to make it clear who is writing what unless your theme is equipped to display this information. Beyond showing the author of a post, however, you may also wish to display the author’s biographical information. A good bio tells readers why you should trust the writer’s advice, for starters. And it also gives the writer a bit of a perk often by way of a link to their website and links to social profiles. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve received more than a few writing gigs from a link to my blog and portfolio in an author bio.

While it is certainly possible to manually add author bio information to your site, if you lack the time and skills, there are plenty of plugin solutions that enable this feature with minimal effort.

Top WordPress Author Bio Plugins

Here’s a handpicked, curated list of the best WordPress author bio plugins, both free and premium, currently available. Happy attributing!

Fancier Author Box

Fancier Author Box is a free author box designed to catch your reader’s eye. This plugin allows several icons for links to your websites and social media, along with the author’s name, Gravatar, and description. It also allows a second tab to show as many of the author’s recent posts as you want.

There are numerous settings for exactly where on your website it appears, and it comes with a multitude of color options for different parts of the box to customize every part of it to your liking. This plugin gives you a lot of options and performs really well. For an engaging, stylish, and easy to use plugin, this is an excellent option.

Fanciest Author Box

A premium plugin by the creators of the above, Fanciest Author Box costs $18 for the plugin with all future updates free and 6 months of support, with an optional $5.40 fee to extend the support to 1 year. It comes with several features for the price, like Google Authorship verification, RSS feeds, Lazy Load to improve the loading speed of your page, and a retina-ready design to make it look even better. It’s also translation ready for use in many other languages. The box is added by default to your posts, but gives the option to disable it in specific ones, or place it manually through the use of shortcodes, widgets, or template tags.

The plugin comes with widgets for all the essential fields, along with a custom HTML tab for anything else. It comes with full color customization, and compatibility with the Co-Authors Plus plugin. It’s the only plugin on the list with a price tag, but if you have the money to spend, it brings several extra features with it.

Author Box Reloaded

A fully configurable and free author box, Author Box Reloaded goes beneath the text on your articles and displays the author’s name, avatar, bio, and all the other essentials. The plugin also includes a very large variety of icons linking to social media, WordPress sites, the Drupal Association, and more. It gives you the option of inserting it automatically to all of your posts, or, alternatively it can be placed manually with a shortcode or template tag.

It supports multiple languages in both left to right and right to left. Finally, it requires WordPress Plugin Framework Reloaded to function, which is also free. If you need an author box that supports lots of links to a wide variety of sites, or want a good, simple plugin that supports several different languages, this is a solid choice.

Simple Author Box

Here’s a simple but effective author box. Much like the others, it is also free. Simple Author Box shows the author’s name, description, and Gravatar, as well as a website link and icons for over 30 social media sites. It’s responsive, so it looks good on all devices, and it offers a full range of customizability for the style, size, and color.

You can have it automatically insert the author box at the end of your posts, or you have the option of manually inserting it directly onto your template file. And it offers right to left support for the languages that need it. Overall this is a simple and clean author box with a lot of options that makes a great choice, especially for cross-platform use.

Starbox

Starbox is a free author bio designed not only to catch the attention of search engines, but to be engaging to the people who visit your site as well. The plugin has a professional design with a multitude of different themes to choose from. It has fields for author name, bio, website links, social media profiles, and even a separate tab for the author’s latest posts. In addition, it comes with Google Authorship for multiple authors.

You can place the box on the top, bottom, or even the side of your post, and set whether it’s visible on posts, pages, or both. And if you have multiple authors on the same site, you can even use different themes and locations to their liking. This plugin is a good choice focused around engaging your readers and supporting multiple authors.

Sexy Author Bio

Sexy Author Bio is a free, appearance-focused author box that both looks appealing and provides a multitude of useful functions. In the aesthetics department it is most importantly designed to look the same on multiple types of screens. It also allows full color and font customization and even 5 sets of “sexy” social media icons. It’s a simple but well designed author box that would enhance any website, especially those of bloggers and sites with multiple contributors.

As for functionality, it includes single and multiple author support, 21 different social media buttons, customizable Gravatar and author bio fields, and the ability to personalize the box’s appearance itself. Sexy Author Bio is not the most complex of author boxes, but for anyone who needs a simple but very good-looking bio that provides all the essential features and a large degree of appearance customization, this is one of the best choices.

WP About Author

WP About Author is an author box designed to be easy to use and customizable. It has built-in WordPress profiles that work right away, as well as three border options and a color picker for the author box’s background, helping you match the plugin’s appearance to your theme. This plugin has a list of easy settings to determine what areas of your site the author box shows up on.

The box displays the author’s name and bio, with the option of icons or text links to their social media, and links to their website and a list of their other posts. It also allows you to change the size and shape of the author’s avatar. A good choice for an easy to use and personalizable plugin that does just what the title says: tell your readers about the authors of your site.

WP Biographia

WP Biographia, a free plugin, looks fairly simple but has a lot of features below the surface. It does a few unconventional things, such as an option to place a shorter version of your bio, or letting you change where the box does and doesn’t appear: Individual posts, RSS feeds, the front page, and more. You can also place it in custom post types, using a shortcode with multiple attributes to go about it. While it doesn’t have as much in the way of appearance design, it does have all the basics: social media icons/links (with the ability to add your own contact info), background color and border fields, and the ability to change the size of the avatar.

Finally, if you’re having any trouble, the plugin tour included may help you get your bearings. WP Biographia is not meant to be installed and used with default settings; if you plan on using it, be prepared to customize to its full extent in order to get the most out of this plugin.

Co-Authors Plus

A large overhaul of the Co-Authors Plus plugin, this author box is the best choice if you have a lot of articles with multiple authors. You can assign multiple bylines to your posts and pages with a search-as-you-type input box that will automatically find the author’s WordPress account for you. And if you have a co-writer who doesn’t have a WordPress account it allows you to create a guest profile that works exactly the same way. The posts show up on the co-authors archive and feed as well, and it allows them to edit until the post is published, allowing you to do the co-writing directly in the draft on your site.

It also allows you to create a list of all your co-authors, helping you keep track or display them all in one place to your readers. Its look isn’t flashy or fancy, but it’s clean and effective. If you do a lot of co-writing or have co-written articles on your site, this is a plugin you’ll almost certainly want.

That’s it! Did I miss your favorite author box plugin? Feel free to share your preferences, whether on this list or not, in the comments below. 

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Szabi Kisded

Hey there, I'm Szabi. At 30 years old, I quit my IT job and started my own business and became a full time WordPress plugin developer, blogger and stay-at-home dad. Here I'm documenting my journey earning an online (semi)passive income. Read more

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