Enhance Your Author Bios with These WordPress Plugins

Enhance Your Author Bios with These WordPress Plugins

Do you have a multi-author blog? If so, how and where is their information displayed on your blog (if at all)? Do you have an author box displayed at the top or bottom of your posts, or maybe you’re using a sidebar widget to display their bios? Whatever method you’re using, I’m sure you already know that it’s important to have something displayed about your authors.

The author bio sectional is not just for displaying information about the author, it’s also a great way for visitors and readers to connect with them. Plus, it shows your appreciation. Your authors provide you with quality content to help grow your blog and readership, so the least you can do is show your support and appreciation by displaying their bio and a link or two, right?

Whether you’re looking to add author bios to your blog, or you want to enhance your author bios and make them stand out, one of these plugins is sure to help.

Free Plugins

Social Author Bio

Social Author Bio adds a stylish “About Author” box above or below your posts (your choice) and even has Google Authorship built right into it. It supports Gravatar for the author image and you can customize the size of the image. Authors can add many social icons to their bio for services like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Skype, YouTube, email, and more. You can even add up to 10 custom social services/icons, if there are unsupported services that you want to include.

Social Author Bio WordPress plugin

This plugin is extremely customizable and gives you many options. For instance, your authors can enable or disable the author bio altogether from their user profile. The admin can choose to automatically insert the author bio on posts, or use a shortcode so that the author bio is only displayed on specific posts. If you’re looking for advanced features, you’ll definitely be pleased with Social Author Bio.

Rating: 4.4 stars | Last Updated: 11/18/2012

Fancier Author Box

Fancier Author Box is another stylish author box that gets displayed at the bottom of your posts. For authors that do now want to show their bio on their posts, they can disable it in their user profile. The plugin can display social icons for Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Fancier Author Box WordPress plugin

It can also displays job information: position, company, company URL. One of the coolest things about Fancier Author Box it adds a tab that can display a certain number of latest posts from the author. This is a great way to get visitors to read other posts from that author, and stay on your blog longer.

Rating: 4.5 stars | Last Updated: 10/16/2012

Author Spotlight

Author Spotlight is an author bio widget for your blog’s sidebar; you can customize the title, profile character limit, more articles text, and read full profile text for the widget. The widget automatically detects the author of a post or page and displays an image (via Gravatar), excerpt from their bio, numerous social media icons, and a link to view more posts by the author.

Author Spotlight WordPress plugin

One of the cool things about Author Spotlight is that it can support posts with co-authors, with the help of the Co-Authors Plus plugin. This means that if there’s more than one author for a post, a widget for both authors will be displayed on the sidebar.

Rating: 3.9 stars | Last Updated: 1/5/2013

About the Author Advanced

About the Author Advanced is another sidebar widget. You can customize the widget and choose which items to display about the author such as their: name, phone, email, website, bio, company, title, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. You can also exclude the widget from specific posts and/or pages (via page ID).

About the Author Advanced WordPress plugin

Like Author Spotlight, the widget can be displayed on posts and pages; the author image is taken from Gravatar. What’s cool about this plugin is the fact that you can display contact information for each author, which is sure to come in handy. Sometimes a reader or company may want to contact the author directly for one reason or another, and About the Author Advanced helps to put that information right in front of them.

Rating: 4.7 stars | Last Updated 9/14/2012

Premium Plugins

WordPress Advanced Authors

WordPress Advanced Authors adds an author box to the bottom of each of your posts and/or pages. Alternately, you can use a shortcode to manually include the author box wherever you’d like in your post and/or page contents. WordPress Advanced Authors has a clean design and quite a few unique features.

WordPress Advanced Authors WordPress plugin

For instance, you can change the avatar size, upload a custom background, change the header color and box shadow color, edit the box shadow size, and select a header font. You can also add social links/icons, enable or disable the author bio, and even add the authors’s latest tweet.

Price: $8.00 | Rating: 4 stars | Last Updated 11/19/12

Fanciest Author Box

Fanciest Author Box is the premium version of Fancier Author Box (mentioned above). In addition to the features that the Fancier plugin offers, Fanciest displays social networking tabs (instead of icons) along with the Latest Posts tab; you can see it in action here. Plus, it can also be displayed as a widget in your sidebar if you prefer.

Fanciest Author Bio WordPress pluginThe Bio tab displays the author’s name, position, company, company URL, and short bio. The Twitter tab displays the author’s Twitter bio and latest tweet. The Facebook tab displays a Facebook follow box (similar to the “like” box, except with a “follow” button). The Google+ tab displays the Google+ “Add to circles” widget for the author. Finally, the LinkedIn tab displays a LinkedIn widget with the author’s name, image on LinkedIn, title, and button to view their profile in a new tab.

Fanciest Author Box is definitely the most intuitive plugin in the bunch and is sure to help your authors increase their social media presence along with the pageviews of their posts.

Price: $10.00 | Rating: 5 Stars | Last Updated 1/5/13

What Style is Author Bio?

So, how have you enhanced your author bio? Are you using the style that’s included with your WordPress theme, or maybe you’re not displaying any type of author bio on your blog at all? Feel free to share in the comments.

Charnita Fance

Charnita is a part-time freelance writer and blogger, and the owner of Social Web Tools. As an early adopter, she enjoys trying out new social media and Internet tools along with WordPress plugins and Web apps. You can find her at various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+

13 Comments

  1. Rishabh Sonker

    A Nice article, Although i have tried all of them, the default one is the best if you don’t want previous posts info
    otherwise Fancier Author Box is Good!
    http://www.aliveblogs.com

  2. Lei-kawaii

    Thanks for these info! It helped me a lot… About the Author Advanced is what I’ve been looking for for ages!.. =)

    http://favoriteanimemangalist.blogspot.com/

  3. Dexter Fulton

    Thanks for the post… I was looking for a good Social Author Bio plugin, and wasn’t really sure which to use, but you laid everything out in one place. You made my job super easy.

    Now I just need to pick one, ’cause all of them look great.

  4. Gabriel

    Great blog post,
    These plugins offer great options to display a single Bio. What if I’m trying to add a page within my site that can display multiple Bio’s on a single page?

    I’m trying to set up an outsourcing site complete with job posting and hiring. I want user to view Bio’s then choose from a list.

  5. Shruti

    You have shared some of the best WordPress author box plugin. But I have Choose Fancier Author Box and i am happy with it. I will be grateful if you share your author box plugin name. I like your author box. Amazing!!

    Shruti

  6. pradyum

    nice

  7. Muhammad Saleem

    Hi you mention all these author bio plugins can tell which one is best suitable for my blog?

  8. Chander Sharma

    Hi Charnita,
    Great post !!! Was looking for this type of plugins.
    Can you tell me some free wordpress themes suitable for my website – http://www.phpring.com. Its a kind of Tutorials website.

    Thank you

  9. muhammad irfan

    Good post Charnita

  10. swetha

    Would a bios box be useful personal blogsite? or just in article/content sites?

  11. Alexander

    Great article, however I was surprised to not see WP Biographia on here. I’m in no way related to it, but happened across it on another article. It’s one of those that gives you the author bio and picture at the bottom, along with social links. Works very well and has a lot of options.

    One thing I am continuing to struggle with is getting an author photo on the author page. I know of User Photo, however I am not well versed with PHP code at all. Can’t believe there isn’t a plugin yet that will do it all.

    Any suggestions?

  12. Jacko

    Good post Charnita,

    This authorship thing is cool and all but what about if it becomes REQUIRED in the future?

    This is the kind of stuff that got AOL knocked off the top spot.

    1. Charnita Fance

      Author

      I guess if Google Authorship becomes required, you can use another WordPress plugin to set that up for your authors. There are a few available.

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