How to Show the Author Description on WordPress

Watch Quick Summary

When you show an author description or bio at the end of your blog posts, you:

(You may also want to show the author description for other contributors to your blog.)

Of course, you don't want to enter an author description each and every time you create a post. That would be inefficient, cumbersome, and difficult (particularly when your bio needs updating!).

Instead you need a single point of reference,, a single place to enter/edit it for each author.

But how do you set it up to work that way on WordPress?

There are two ways to approach it.

Let's start by checking your WordPress theme...

How to Check If Your Theme Supports Showing Author Descriptions

Start by navigating to Appearance > Themes on the WordPress menu.

Click on the Customise button for your active theme.

Click on Theme Options.

Look for something that relates to an author bio or author description.

For your own theme, it’s probably going to say something different, or maybe on a submenu somewhere.

This is down to the theme, rather than WordPress, so each one is likely to be a little different.

You can also of course consult the theme’s documentation. Try googling wordpress theme [theme name] documentation to find it.

For the Inclusive theme, used in this example, that would look like this:

If you can’t see it in the customization options or referenced in the documentation, then it’s unlikely your theme supports it. You’ll need to look at WordPress plugins instead, which are covered in the section below.

Let’s see an example of how our example theme, Inclusive, caters for showing an author description.

After clicking through on Author Biography options, there are some checkboxes available, enabling you to show the author biography on both posts and pages.

Again, the theme for your own blog will show something different.

In this case, after ticking the checkbox, the preview refreshed, and showed the author bio at the end of each post, as shown here:

The immediate issue was that it was showing ‘admin’ as the author name.

This wasn’t an issue with the theme itself, but the nickname needed to be adjusted within the relevant WordPress profile.

For this example theme, there wasn’t an easy way to do this, but you could achieve it via some custom CSS.

It then looked like this:

The remaining issue was the Visit the author’s website link shown beneath, which we needed to change to be incorporated into the author description.

Unchecking the Display the author’s website link option in the theme (shown on one of the images above) did the trick, along with editing the author description from the user profile.

The final version shown at the end of published posts looked like this:

So it was certainly possible, at least with the theme used here, to show the author description through the theme itself. There was no need for a separate plugin.

However, it was a little more complicated than it might otherwise have been by using a plugin. If you go this route too you may need a developer’s help to get it to look the way you need.

So let’s now investigate the alternative, and probably more widely used option—using a WordPress plugin to show the author description at the end of posts...

Plugins to Show the Author Description on WordPress

The following three plugins were the top three plugins listed on WordPress for ‘author bio’ that:

1. Simple Author Box

Simple Author Box is designed to “Add a responsive author box with social icons to any post”, with over 50,000 active installations at the time of writing, and rated four and a half stars.

After installing and activating the plugin…

… you can click through on Settings from the Plugins page.

The settings page looks like this:

Before adjusting any settings, by taking a look at a test post, the author description could be seen already showing at the bottom as a result of activating the plugin:

If you want a different profile image to the one supplied to WordPress through Gravatar for your email address, you can do this via your user profile:

This is also where you can add social media links to the author description box:

At least a couple of dozen social platforms are shown, though this still shows some outdated options like StumbleUpon and Google+—perhaps these will be removed in a future update.

Note that, when entering a new social link, you should enter the full link for the platform, not just your handle.

Back to the test post, the social icons are shown in a separate row at the bottom of the author description:

Options in the plugin allow you to:

So, depending on your needs, the final options might look like this:

On the appearance tab, you can adjust:

The Colors tab provides, as you would expect, various color options for the display of the author description:

Via the Typography tab, you can fine-tune the fonts used—both family and size—as well as adjust the size of the social icons.

On the Misc tab, there’s a Load generated inline style to footer option, useful if you have another plugin to optimize the CSS of your website and help with site speed scores. This is on by default, so just leave as-is unless you have a specific reason to change it.

The only aspect missing from the plugin is the ability to show the author description on WordPress pages as well as posts, which for many users would be beneficial.

Ultimately however, presuming you don’t need author descriptions on pages, the Simple Author Box plugin seems a very good choice.

It proved to be simple and easy to use, enabling you to show the author description at the bottom of posts within just a few seconds.

The customisation options makes it very easy to adjust the appearance to fit with your website and other requirements.

There’s also an option to upgrade—currently $39 for a single website—giving you some additional options such as the ability to:

2. Starbox

Starbox, “the Author Box for Humans”, gives you an “Author Box that’s gorgeous to look at and makes your readers click all the way through to see more about the Authors”.

At the time of writing, it had over 20,000 active installations, and was rated four and a half stars.

After installing and activating the Starbox plugin, again the author description immediately showed at the bottom of posts.

As shown above, there was an additional ‘Latest Posts’ tab, which you can turn off by selecting a different theme for the author box—more on that soon.

It was also noted that there was no indication that the link in the author description was clickable, though this was related to style settings for the blog’s theme rather than the plugin, and would simply need tweaking.

The initial plugin options let you toggle the following options:

The third option above (Show the Starbox with Top Star theme…)—designed to show the author avatar and name under each post title—didn’t seem to do anything.

It was possibly something to do with the theme, or maybe we'd missed something—we couldn’t see anything similar listed on their support page.

Either way, it seemed unclear.

The plugin also provides various theme settings, along with a useful preview:

A number of different theme choices are available, and are worth exploring further.

A couple other options let you change the size of the name and description, but any other visual adjustments would need to be via CSS for which you may need a developer to assist.

Further settings relating to the plugin are available on the author’s profile page.

You can for example:

Overall, while the plugin works fine, it was found to be less comprehensive than Simple Author Box, a little clunkier to use, and the choices less intuitive.

For any visual adjustments beyond the theme settings, you would need knowledge of CSS or the help of a developer.

However, unlike Simple Author Box, it does display the author description on WordPress pages.

3. About Author

The About Author plugin claims to “display author’s information in style”, with over 1,000 active installations at the time of writing, and rated four and a half stars.

Despite installing and activating the plugin, on checking a test post there was no author description shown.

On clicking through to the settings from the plugins page (after activating it), it’s apparently not shown by default, so that needs turning on for pages and/or posts.

However, even with both options turned on, there was still no author description shown on the test post we were using

On checking other settings, it invited me to select a template style by choosing a shortcode—but none were shown in the dropdown:

A menu for the plugin was then noticed in the sidebar.

After checking back with their plugin page, it was necessary to add a shortcode to a post to get the author description to show.

But this didn't really match the requirements and would be rather cumbersome in practice.

Rather than have to remember to add a shortcode at the end of each and every post, it would be far easier just to have an author box show up automatically as with the first two plugins above.

Even after adding the shortcode to the test post, nothing showed.

The next step was to try adding a shortcode via the menu link, sticking with all the defaults, and just saving and copying the shortcode provided.

On adding this additional shortcode to the post, and selecting the shortcode in the Author Settings, it was apparent that now both shortcodes had become active.

In the end, this plugin just become increasingly frustrating to work with, and in practice would have been soon abandoned for an alternative.

To Conclude

As is usually the case with WordPress plugins, some are a lot better than others, and that’s certainly been the case here.

To show the author description on WordPress, if you can’t otherwise show it using your theme (as illustrated towards the start of this post), it's recommended to:

Finally, take two secs to grab the free cheatsheet on showing the author description on WordPress so you have it to refer back to: