WordPress is for everyone, including your friends, family members, and associates. You might want to let these people to blog a post on your behalf, it happens, we’ve all done it before. The default codex that WordPress uses to display author information is quite lousy – in terms of capabilities – and a plugin is usually required, to give authors the spotlight and credit they deserve.

Yes, those who’re knowledgeable within PHP (or simply WordPress) and web development, will surely know how to create a custom function to display authors in a more efficient manner, but because not everyone is a developer, we will use plugins to solve this problem for us. So now it’s time to dive into our list of alternative author box plugins to use on our WordPress blogs. We’ve tried each of them, and have ranked them in accordance to our own liking / preference.

Fancier Author Box

Fancier Author Box
Image Source: WordPressPlugin Directory

By using Fancier Author Box – you’ll be making your authors stand out from the rest of the page, and finally give them the attention that they deserve. Not everyone is guest blogging or writing for you for the sake of getting some exposure or link juice, many people actually would like to connect with like-minded readers, and potential new community members.

This plugin supports the ability to display all the major social networks within the Author Box, and also to display the latest content written by the author, on a separate tab. Great looking widget that surely stands out from the rest of the page elements.

Simple Author Box

Simple Author Box
Image Source: WordPressPlugin Directory

We can never seem to say no to simplicity, but Simple Author Box adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author Gravatar and author description. You can also select up to 30 social networks, to have them displayed alongside the author box. Very modern design, will be a fit for majority of blogs today.

Starbox – the Author Box for Humans

Starbox
Image Source: WordPressPlugin Directory

While search engines and other software that read your site care about stuff like robots.txt, you need Human readers to actually engage with your content and fall in love with it. People like to see beautifully designed web pages, and more often than not – every element counts.

We’re quite inspired and pleased with the end-result of the Starbox plugin. You get the functionality that a premium plugin should provide, but you also get many other things like;

  • 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.
  • Each of your Authors can have a different set of social media profiles added.
  • Links to all the articles written by that author

and a lot, lot more! You can really experience how much work has went into creating this plugin, and in terms of functionality – it probably is the richest one in the list.

WP Author Box Lite

WP Author Box Lite
Image Source: WordPressPlugin Directory

You can never have too many styling options, and because WP Author Box Lite provides so much flexibility in that regard, we felt like we must include it. Save some extra time by having Google+ & Facebook authorship integrated within this plugin. Modifying and adding new custom tabs is also very easy.

Author Box After Posts

Author Box After Posts
Image Source: WordPressPlugin Directory

We guess this is the simplest of all the author box plugins in our list, the Author Box After Posts plugin only has to be downloaded and activated, it will automatically grab the information about the user who has written the blog post, and then display it in a very minimal manner. Is perfect for writers and people who’re not depending on stylish and bloated elements on their pages.

Customized Author Box for WordPress

Giving your authors the recognition they deserve is only going to make them come back, and probably with a lot more insight and resourcefulness for your readers. It’s the nature of things, we all like to be seen, and especially so when the subject of the matter is something we’ve built, written. We’re hoping to see more suggestions for this particular topic.

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