In my post on Making Your WordPress Site More Secured, I’ve highlighted that it is a good practice to avoid using “admin” as your WordPress admin username. However, without much preemptive awareness, many are quite likely to use “admin” as the dashboard admin username. If you are one that got “admin” as your dashboard admin username, fret not. It is relatively easy to change the WordPress admin username to something like “willtan” or “will_admin”.

First, login to your WordPress dashboard using the original “admin” :

Then, Add New User with the new username using a new email (that is different from the original “admin” email). Remember to use a strong password and set the Role to “Administrator”.

Log out and re-login again with the new admin username ie. “willtan” :

Go to Users > All Users and delete “admin” user :

If there are existing posts posted under the old “admin” username, remember to “Attribute all posts to” to the new admin username, else the posts will be deleted!

That’s it! You would have successfully created a new admin username.

Alternative Method Using phpMyAdmin in cPanel

There’s a faster alternative which you might try if you’re familiar with cPanel. In fact, this is my favourite method. In this case, you’ll have to, of course, log in to your cPanel and click on phpMyAdmin :

Select your WordPress database > wp_users table > edit the “admin” row > change user_login from “admin” to your preferred username ie. willtan and click “Go” :

Log out of phpMyAdmin and cPanel. Your dashboard admin username is now changed to the new preferred username and you can log in with the same password.