If you have a User-Generated Content website or blog to share articles written by different authors with the audience, you might need an author box that displays at the bottom of your blog posts and provides biographical information about the author.
Having an author bio could help readers seek out more articles they enjoy reading. It also helps establish a trusting relationship between your website and your users.
There are already many themes (most of which are premium themes) that come with the Author Box feature.
For those who are using free WordPress themes without the author box, there are 5 best and full free WordPress author box plugins from which you can use in your next website or blog. Enjoy.
Originally Published Sep 03 2020, updated Mar 23 2023
1. Simple Author Box
Total downloads: 60,000+
Five Star Ratings: 100+
The plugin adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author gravatar and author description – author bio.
It also adds over 30 social profile fields on the WordPress user profile screen, allowing to display the author social icons in the author box.
Features:
- Shows author gravatar, name, website, description (author bio) and social icons
- Fully customizable to match your theme design (style, color, size and text options)
- Nice looking on desktop, laptop, tablet or mobile phones
- Automatically insert the author box at the end of your post
- Option to manually insert the author box on your template file (single.php or author.php)
- Simple Author Box has RTL support
- Simple Author Box has AMP support
- Great for guest posts, and guest authors
2. Starbox
Total downloads: 50,000+
Five Star Ratings: 200+
An Author Box that’s gorgeous to look at and it makes your readers click all the way through to see more about the Authors.
Key Features:
- Google Microformats (vCard), to display Rich Snippets in google search results
- Easy to customize for each Author
- You’ll get Google Authorship on your hands For all your authors.
- Have it work only on blog posts, only on pages, or both!
- Links to the social media profiles of your authors: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Instagram, Flickr, Pinterest, Tumblr, Youtube, Vimeo
- Each of your Authors can have a different set of social media profiles added
- Links to all the articles written by that author
- A section that displays the latest posts of a certain author
- Themes to choose from
- Themes setup for each individual Author, to really make them shine
- You Can set the Name of the Author
- You Can set the Job Title of each Author
- Can set Company (with a link to the company’s site)
- Each Author can make the Author Box look like it’s her own
- You can choose not to display it for certain authors
- Removes any other author box from the page, so that there aren’t duplicates
- Enables you to upload your own image (so that you won’t need a Gravatar)
- Paragraphs in the Author Bio to have a better-looking text
- Displays the Author Box in the special pages built for each author.
- Special Pages for your authors
- Works even with sites that have woocommerce or other eCommerce plugins
- Add Starbox in your post’s content or WordPress widgets using the shortcodes
3. WP Post Author
Total downloads: 20,000+
Five Star Ratings: 5+
A WordPress plugin to create a minimal clean post author box with social contact icons, author bio section, widgets on the WordPress website.
Features:
- Section title.
- Alignment
- Profile image layout
- Show author role or Not
- Show author email or not
- Author Widgets
- Easy to implement via shortcodes
4. PublishPress Authors
Total downloads: 10,000+
Five Star Ratings: 50+
PublishPress Authors allows you to create, manage and display authors for all your WordPress content. The plugin provides author boxes that can display one author, coauthors, multiple authors or even guest authors. The boxes have the author’s name, avatar, description and more. You can also place the author boxes in widgets, shortcodes and Gutenberg blocks.
Features:
- Author Box. As soon as you install PublishPress Authors, you’ll see an author box under every post. You can add all the profile details you need for each author.
- Multiple Authors. By default, WordPress only allows one author per post. PublishPress Authors allows you to add an unlimited number of authors to each post. This is very useful if you have a busy site and need to manage and give credit to coauthors.
- Guest Authors. You can create Guest Authors who don’t have an account on your site. This is important because not all writers need a username and password.
- Author Pages. PublishPress Authors allows you to showcase the work of each individual author with customizable author pages where you decide which post information is displayed.
5. Molongui
Total downloads: 9,000+
Five Star Ratings: 130+
Molongui Authorship is the authors plugin that provides you with all the tools that WordPress is missing when it comes to giving credit to your content creators:
- Automatically insert the author box at the end of your post. Zero configuration
- Author box position can be changed: above the content, below or both
- Fully customizable to match your design (style, color, size and text options)
- Additional author profile fields (custom avatar, job position, company, phone) and +90 author social icons
- Related author posts
- Different layouts options
- Optionally display a custom headline above the author box
- Responsive author box. Looks great on desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile
- SEO friendly. Microdata support
- Credit everyone: Single Authors, Multiple Authors and Guest Authors
- One post, multiple authors
- Easily add co-authors to your posts
- Post byline displays all authors. No need to use the author box
- Post byline links each name to their author page
- Add authors without creating a WordPress user account for them
- Unlimited guest authors
- Pick guest authors for your posts exactly the same way you do for registered users
- Each guest author has a full profile with avatar
- Post byline display guest author name. No need to use the author box
Conclusion:
If you run a blog and want an author box that stands out from the crowd, try one of these five WordPress plugins. We’ve researched and tested these author box plugins for about a year, to guarantee that they are updated and continue to work.
Hundreds of other WordPress author boxes just didn’t make the cut compared to these ten. We think that they are all well-designed, useful and easy to customize. Check them out, find which ones you like best and let us know which ones we missed in the comments section below!
