Smart User Slug Hider

The Smart User Slug Hider Plugin hides usernames in Author Pages URLs to enhance Security

Originally created by Peter Raschendorfer, maintained by WP User Manager since October 2026.

Questions or problems? Ask in the support forum.

Usage

The plugin automatically replaces user names with 16 digits coded strings. There are no settings. Just install and forget. Deactivating the Plugin restores the default WordPress behavior.

Why use this plugin?

WordPress uses the pattern example.com/author/name for author page URLs where name represents the users login name.

This means that the login names from all your users are publicly visible which is a serious security flaw.

The Smart User Slug Hider Plugin changes all author page URLs from e.g. example.com/author/john to something like example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac.

The codes are generated automatically and its impossible to make conclusions about the user names. The WordPress default URLs will cause a 404 (not found) error.

Shortcodes

The plugin adds three shortcodes you can use in your posts:

• [smart_user_slug] – the user slug of the post author – e.g. e9e716def73f76ac
• [smart_user_url] – the url of the post author’s profile page – e.g. example.com/author/e9e716def73f76ac
• [smart_user_link] – adds a link to the post author’s profile page

Theme Functions

The plugin adds two functions that can be used in theme files:

• get_smart_user_slug( $author_id ) to get the user slug for the author – the parameter $author_id is optional, if omitted the author`s ID of the current post is used
• the_smart_user_slug( $author_id ) to display the user slug for the author – the parameter $author_id is optional, if omitted the author`s ID of the current post is used

Plugin Privacy Information

• This plugin does not set cookies
• This plugin does not collect or store any data
• This plugin does not send any data to external servers