Verify WordPress Author Set to Site Owner Name

Task Library

Confirms every post is attributed to the site owner's author account – not admin, VA, or agency logins – so authorship signals accrue to the person's entity.

Category: Website QA Audit

Use this when running Layer 2 (Content Architecture Checks) of the Website QA Audit – bylines like "admin" leak that a VA runs the site and waste E-E-A-T signals.

The rule (who the author must be)

The default author of a personal-brand site is the person the site is about – billybatt.com → Billy Batt, alexiltchev.com → Alex Iltchev. Never a blanket agency name or "Dennis Yu." When you don't already know the owner, read it straight off the site's own identity, in this order: an existing real (non-admin) author on the posts → the site's lone real user → og:site_name → Person-schema name → the <title> (up to the first tagline delimiter) → a cleanly-splittable domain (nic-padilla.com → Nic Padilla). "Dennis Yu" is the fallback only for a page that names no identifiable person at all (a parked/for-sale/category page).

Two things must both be true (check BOTH, not just the byline)

  1. Display name (the visible byline) is the owner's real full name – never "admin"/"administrator", a VA, or an agency login.
  2. Author-archive slug is the owner's name (/author/billy-batt/) – not /author/admin/. A post can show "Billy Batt" as the byline while its author account still has the slug admin (WordPress user_nicename), which broadcasts a default install to Google. The REST author.slug is the source of truth here; the visible byline alone will hide this.

Inputs

  • WordPress admin access (Posts list and Users screen), or public REST read for the audit pass
  • The owner's correct display name as it should appear publicly (derive it via "The rule" above if unknown)
  • The audit report/spreadsheet for logging results

Steps

  1. In WordPress → Users, confirm an author account exists for the owner with the correct display name, a clean slug (their name, not admin), a real bio, and a real profile photo.
  2. In Posts → All Posts, add the Author column view and scan every post; flag any authored by "admin", a VA, an agency account, or a misspelled variant.
  3. Machine-readable pass (do this even for small sites): pull /wp-json/wp/v2/posts?per_page=100&_embed=author&status=publish and flag any post whose _embedded.author[0].slug OR .name is admin/administrator. The slug check is what catches the "right byline, wrong /author/admin/ URL" case.
  4. Spot-check the live site: open several posts and confirm the visible byline and the author-archive URL show the owner's name.
  5. Reassign/rename per the fix skill set-wordpress-author-to-correct-person (rename the lone admin account's display+slug, or reassign to an existing real user – see its A/B/C situations).
  6. Verify persistence: re-pull ?_embed=author after the fix and confirm zero admin bylines/slugs remain. A REST 200 that a page cache or a later site rebuild silently reverts is the known failure mode – a fix isn't done until a fresh read confirms it stuck.
  7. Log the count of posts checked and reassigned in the audit report.

Definition of done (QA checklist)

  • 100% of published posts attributed to the owner's account – zero "admin"/VA bylines AND zero /author/admin/ slugs (both author.name and author.slug verified via REST)
  • Owner's author profile has correct display name, clean name-based slug, real bio, and photo, and the author archive renders at /author/<owner>/
  • Re-pull confirms the fix persisted (not just a one-shot 200)
  • Counts logged in the audit report, linked back to /website-qa-audit

Example(s)

  • Example needed – run the Meta-Article Prompt after first real run.

File in the zip: skills/website-qa-audit/verify-wordpress-author-set-to-site-owner-name.md. Download the Task Library zip.

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