Website security is an important function as such you may at some point need to change the WordPress admin username. Typically the most basic way to hack a website is to brute force attack the administrative page. Let’s look at how this happens firstly;
Brute Force Attacks:
A brute force attack is a simple concept in addition to be one of the most common forms of attack on your website. The idea is that a person or more commonly a piece of software attempts to guess the password and this is a lot easier when a common admin username is used. First of all you should have a complex password already to begin with but lets assume you already know that. Many people still use simple passwords which are far too easy to guess by a computer making a brute force attack easy.
How WordPress is attacked:
Attackers rely on two common occurrences in the average installation of WordPress. Firstly the administrative page is /wp-admin and secondly the default username is admin. This means that the only thing a hacker needs to guess is the password and having secure password will make this a lot more difficult. Changing the administrative username therefore increases the complexity by adding an additional variable.
Change The WordPress Admin Username:
You are not able to change the actual WordPress username. Probably because of the backend database structure, you can create a new user though. To do this create a new user with the administrative privilege and log into WordPress as this new user. Once you have logged in as the new user you can delete the old admin user. Be sure to select the option to attribute the posts made by the old user to your new user. If you do not select this option the posts will be deleted. I suggest that you backup your data first if you are unsure.
And there you have it, simple and quick. Remember with new or future installations to set your username to something other than admin. You can save yourself this bit of hassle if you do this while creating a new WordPress site.