How to Change WordPress Post Author in Bulk

Changing WordPress post author is easy through the WordPress dashboard. You can go to post edit screen and change the author name.

But that is for a single post only. What happens when you try to change multiple post authors at one go? How to do that?

Well there are two ways to do that. The first one is from the posts edit screen. Click on posts in the WordPress dashboard, go to the posts edit screen. Then choose the screen option like below –

Then in number of items per page option choose how many posts you want to edit at once. Save.

Now click on the title option to select all the displayed posts.

Then select Bulk actions option and select edit. You can now edit post author of multiple posts in one go.

Mind you, you can change the posts author to a single author only.

Another way to change the post author needs you to be a bit techy guy because you will need to do a bit of MySql manipulation in database.

The idea is that, you will open the WordPress database using PhpMyAdmin (should be familiar with database stuff).

Then go to the WordPress database. The table to select is wp_posts.

Write the following sql query in an edit window.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author=new_author WHERE <your condition>;

Obviously you have to change new_author and <your_condition>

The value of new_author is the ID of the new author that you want. You can get the ID of the author from the edit users screen. See the image below –

Clicking on All Users will take you to edit users screen. Click on the user link you want the ID of.

User profile page will show and you will get the ID of the user from browser address bar.

https://www.webdesignvista.com/wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=21&wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fusers.php

Of course the domain will not be webdesignvista.com and it will be your domain.

You can user this ID in place of new_user.

The value of <your condition> will vary depending on what you want to do. If you want that all post authors should be changed to the new_author, then the complete query will be –

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author=new_author;

If you want to change a range of authors and you know the ID range then it will be –

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_author=new_author WHERE post_author > starting_id and post_author < ending_id

The values starting_id and ending_id will be the range of post id authors and will be changed accordingly.

There are also complex queries you can execute to change author in different case scenarios.