How To Remove Author Prefix From Slug In WordPress

Earlier we shared a snippet to change the author prefix from WordPress author slug, which will change yoursite.com/author/name to yoursite.com/profile/name.

Now, it’s time to share another snippet which will remove the author prefix from slug in WordPress, which will change yoursite/author/name to yoursite/name. You can use this snippet if your WordPress is a personal blog with a single author, which makes some sense to me.

Just add following snippet to your current theme’s functions.php file:

// The first part //
add_filter('author_rewrite_rules', 'no_author_base_rewrite_rules');
function no_author_base_rewrite_rules($author_rewrite) {
    global $wpdb;
    $author_rewrite = array();
    $authors = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT user_nicename AS nicename from $wpdb->users");   
    foreach($authors as $author) {
        $author_rewrite["({$author->nicename})/page/?([0-9]+)/?$"] = 'index.php?author_name=$matches[1]&paged=$matches[2]';
        $author_rewrite["({$author->nicename})/?$"] = 'index.php?author_name=$matches[1]';
    }  
    return $author_rewrite;
}

// The second part //
add_filter('author_link', 'no_author_base', 1000, 2);
function no_author_base($link, $author_id) {
    $link_base = trailingslashit(get_option('home'));
    $link = preg_replace("|^{$link_base}author/|", '', $link);
    return $link_base . $link;
}