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5 Best Free Author Bio Box Plugins for WordPress Compared (2026)

Are you looking for a quick and easy way to connect with your readers on a personal level? In our experience, showing an author bio box on your website can make a big difference.

By adding an author bio box, you get the chance to show off the people behind the content. This can help you build trust, boost your website’s credibility, and encourage engagement.

And if you are looking to expand your team, a bio box is a great way to highlight opportunities to potential writers.

Plus, at WPBeginner, we understand that not all bloggers can spend money on premium WordPress plugins, and a tight budget is a common reality for new websites. Fortunately, you don’t need to invest in costly solutions to add this important feature. 

In this article, we’ll highlight the best free author bio box plugins for WordPress.

7 best free author bio box plugins for WordPress compared (2021)

Quick Picks: Best Free Author Bio Box Plugins

Don’t have time to read? Here are our top choices for the best free author bio box plugins for WordPress.

#Author Bio Box PluginKey Features
1Simple Author BoxMany customization options, real-time author box preview
2WP Post AuthorModern bio style, supports co-authors and guest authors
3WPCodeSimple author bio box, other blog customization options
4StarboxPre-made themes, show author’s latest posts
5Molongui AuthorshipFlexible display options, supports guest and co-authors

Why Use an Author Bio Box Plugin for WordPress?

An author bio box plugin lets you customize and display an author bio section at the end of your WordPress posts.

Many WordPress themes have this feature built-in. However, a plugin lets you change how the author bio is displayed, add social media links, and much more.

Author bio example

Adding a custom author bio box section can benefit your WordPress blog in many ways.

  • Improve author credibility and authority with your readers
  • Build a connection between readers and authors
  • Help persuade guest authors to write for your website

When selecting the best author bio box plugin for your WordPress site, you need to consider a number of different factors. We’ll explore these in the next section.

How We Test and Review Author Bio Box Plugins

Picking the right free author bio box plugin can be tricky because not all plugins offer the same features or level of usability. That’s why we’ve tested a range of options, evaluating their functionality, performance, and ease of setup.

Below, you’ll find the key factors we considered in our selection process:

  • Ease of Use: We chose plugins that make it easy to add author bios. They are simple to set up, easy to configure from the WordPress dashboard, and automatically pull information from user profiles.
  • Customization Options: We looked for plugins that offer flexibility in design, allowing you to tailor the author bio box to match your website’s branding. This includes options for adjusting colors, fonts, layouts, and social media icons.
  • Display Options: The best author bio box plugins provide a variety of ways to display the bio, whether it’s below a post, in a sidebar, or on a dedicated author page. We examined how flexible each plugin was in terms of display location and visibility.
  • Responsiveness: Given that many users browse on different devices, we made sure that each plugin supports a responsive design, displaying author bios correctly on all screen sizes.

Why Trust WPBeginner?

With 16 years of WordPress experience, including plugin development, eCommerce, and web design, WPBeginner thoroughly tests all recommended plugins to ensure they meet our high standards. For more details, see our full editorial process.

With that said, let’s take a look at some of the most popular author bio box plugins for WordPress that you can use on your WordPress website.

1. Simple Author Box

Simple Author Box

Simple Author Box is the best author bio box plugin. What started as a simple way to add a clean author box to your WordPress posts has grown into a very feature-rich plugin.

This plugin lets you customize nearly every aspect of your author bio box. You can add an author bio, social media links, and even upload a custom profile picture for each user.

This is a fantastic feature for website owners who want to keep everything ‘in-house,’ as it allows you to bypass the third-party Gravatar system and host your team’s headshots directly on your own WordPress server.

Simple Author Box settings

You also have complete control over the colors, typography, background, and more. There’s an option to show the author’s email address so your readers can get in touch directly.

The real-time preview box lets you see the changes to your author bio box as you customize it.

If you want even more features, then there’s a Pro version that lets you display an author box before or after content, add website links, get more social icon styles, include guest and co-authors, and more.

For more details, see our complete Simple Author Box review. You can also follow our guide on how to add an author info box in WordPress posts.

2. WP Post Author

WP Post Author

WP Post Author is a simple and easy-to-use author bio plugin. It seamlessly integrates with your site’s design and will blend into your content.

This plugin will display the author’s avatar, name, company role, short bio, and social media icons.

WP Post Author author bio example

We like that you have control over which elements of the author bio will display, and you can also change the alignment of the text and author image.

There are 3 different widgets and a shortcode you can use to display your author bio in your sidebar and other areas of your website.

3. WPCode

WPCode's homepage

WPCode allows you to safely and easily add new features to your WordPress website with custom code. It comes with 2000+ ready-made code snippets that you can add in just a couple of clicks, including an Author Bio After Post snippet.

This automatically pulls the author bio info and avatar from your WordPress user profile and displays it after your WordPress blog posts.

The author bio will blend with your WordPress theme for a simple and professional look. Here’s how it looked when we tried it on our test website:

Author bio example using WPCode

Aside from the author bio, WPCode offers many other snippets to help you improve your blog. For example, there are snippets for setting a minimum word count for posts, adding a ‘new’ badge for recent posts, display reading time, and more.

4. Starbox

Starbox

Starbox is a feature-rich and easy-to-use author bio box plugin. The goal is to make it as easy as possible to create a custom author bio box.

You’ll find a few different themes you can use to customize your author bios.

With this plugin, you can create unique author bio boxes for every author on your website. You have control over social media profiles, name, job or role, image, and more.

There’s even the option to add a tabbed author bio that includes the latest posts from that author.

If you’re running an online store, then this plugin can integrate with WooCommerce to display unique author bios as well.

5. Molongui Authorship

Molongui Authorship

If you frequently host one-time contributors or interviewees on your site, Molongui Authorship is likely your best choice. Its standout ‘killer feature’ is the ability to credit guest authors and co-authors without ever needing to create a WordPress user account for them.

This is a massive benefit for bloggers who want to keep their user database clean and secure.

Instead of cluttering your site with dozens of ‘Guest’ accounts that could pose a security risk, Molongui lets you simply type in the contributor’s name and details. Their bio and profile picture will appear in a professional author box just like a regular team member.

If you want to add additional authors and co-authors to WordPress, then see our guide on how to add new users and authors to your WordPress blog.

If you eventually decide to bring a regular guest onto your permanent team, Molongui even includes a one-click tool to convert a guest profile into a full WordPress user account.

There are many customization options, including multiple layouts, colors, typography, author avatars, social media icons, and more. You can also control whether the author bio displays above or below the content.

Plus, you can fully customize the author bio using the WordPress Customizer, which makes things easy.

Upgrading Your Strategy: Advanced Author Tools

While the free plugins we’ve discussed are excellent for adding a basic author box, you may eventually find that you need more power to truly stand out in search results or to perfectly match your branding.

If you have the budget to invest in your site’s growth, these Bonus tools offer professional-grade features that free plugins simply cannot match, particularly when it comes to SEO and total design control.

All in One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO

All in One SEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin in the market, used by over 3 million websites.

While the other plugins on this list focus on the visual ‘look’ of your author box, AIOSEO is included here as a bonus because it handles the technical behind-the-scenes SEO that those visual plugins often miss.

If your goal is to rank higher, you need to think beyond just a pretty design. AIOSEO ensures that search engines like Google can actually verify your expertise through a framework called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

It does this by adding schema markup, which is invisible code that tells Google exactly who you are and why you’re qualified to speak on a topic.

By default, your author profile pages display a list of posts from that specific writer. AIOSEO expands this by letting you add social media links into the page’s metadata.

This helps search engines connect your WordPress profile to your established Facebook and Twitter (X) profiles, creating a verified digital footprint for your brand.

AIOSEO author bio social links

For more details, you can see our guide on how to display author’s Twitter and Facebook on the profile page.

Note: There’s also a premium version of AIOSEO that offers a powerful Author SEO addon. This allows you to create a detailed author bio to better meet Google’s E-E-A-T content guidelines and improve your rankings.

In your author bio, you can add E-E-A-T signals, including education, job title, employer, categories of expertise, and more, to help search engines easily identify your credentials.

AIOSEO E-E-A-T Author SEO addon

You can also add a mini bio that appears when a user hovers over the author name, enable or disable compact bios, add a reviewer for your articles, and more.

Bonus: SeedProd

SeedProd

SeedProd is a premium drag and drop page builder for WordPress. It lets you create custom WordPress themes, layouts, and landing pages, without needing to touch a line of code.

It comes with an ‘Author Bio’ block that lets you quickly showcase information about a specific author on any page or post in WordPress.

The author bio block pulls the author details directly from the WordPress user profile and displays it automatically.

Plus, with SeedProd’s template kits and 90+ page blocks, you can easily create custom author pages that include an author bio, social profiles, recent articles, social media feeds, and more.

Create a custom author page with SeedProd blocks

For step-by-step instructions, see our tutorial on how to create a custom author page in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you find the best free author bio box plugin for WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to change the author of a post in WordPress and our expert picks of the must-have WordPress plugins for business websites.

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Reader Interactions

5 CommentsLeave a Reply

  1. Thanks for the list, I have chosen WP Post Author as I see it has features I have, including shortcode to show the author box in any area across my site. This is a good plugin to will help me out, to show a beautiful author box on my site.

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