Most bloggers ignore their author pages entirely. WordPress auto-generates one when you sign up, and it sits there for the life of the blog: a thumbnail, three lines of bio nobody wrote on purpose, and a chronological list of posts. The few readers who click “about the author” land on a page that does nothing for them.
This is one of the easiest wins available to a blogger. The author page is the second-most-visited page on most blogs after the homepage. With about 30 minutes of work, it can become a quiet subscriber engine. This post explains how.
Why author pages matter more than they look
Visitors click on author pages for one reason: they read a post they liked and want to know who wrote it. That’s a high-intent moment. The reader is one click away from following the blog, but they need to be invited to take it.
The default author page is a wall of recent posts. The visitor scrolls, doesn’t see what they’re looking for (who is this person?), and bounces. That visitor was warm, and you lost them for nothing.
A good author page treats the visit as the conversion opportunity it actually is. NN/g’s research on trustworthy web design found that a real person behind the content, shown clearly and consistently, is one of the strongest credibility signals a site can offer, which is exactly what a barebones author archive fails to do. Google’s own guidance on experience and trustworthiness signals makes a similar point from the search side: a page that clearly shows who wrote the content, and why they’re worth listening to, is part of what separates trustworthy sites from thin ones.
The three things every author page needs
1. A human introduction
Not a corporate bio. Not a list of credentials. A few sentences that sound like a person talking: who you are, what you write about, and why you write about it.
The reader doesn’t need to know you have a master’s degree. They need to know you’re a real person with a real perspective.
Aim for about 2 to 4 sentences for the lead bio, optionally followed by 1 to 2 paragraphs of more detail. If your bio is longer than the visitor’s attention span, it’s too long.
2. Your best work, not your latest
This is the biggest fix you can make. A new reader doesn’t care what your last post was. They care which posts they should read to get to know you.
Replace, or at least supplement, the chronological feed with a curated section:
- “Start here”: your 3 to 5 best posts.
- “Best of”: your most popular or most cherished posts by category.
- “What I’m known for”: the posts that represent your point of view.
Then below that, the chronological feed can stay in place for readers who want to scroll further.
3. A way to follow you
The reader is interested, so give them the next step. A few options, roughly in order of impact:
- Email signup. The highest-leverage option. Email subscribers are the strongest asset a blogger has.
- RSS link. Still useful for readers who use feed readers.
- Social media links. Helpful, but less durable than email over time.
One clear call to action beats five competing ones. If the reader has to decide between a newsletter, X, Instagram, RSS, and YouTube all at once, they’ll typically pick none of them.
What to leave out
A few things generally don’t belong on the author page:
- A full CV. Your career history is for LinkedIn, not your blog.
- Banner ads or display ads. This is a conversion page, not an inventory placement.
- A generic stock photo of “person writing on laptop.” Use a real photo of you instead.
- “Hi I’m John and welcome to my blog where I write about various topics.” Generic intros like this one bury you.
- A wall of social icons. One or two platforms you’re actually active on is plenty.
The “photo” question
Yes, use a real photo. The “I’m camera-shy” instinct is understandable, but the data is consistent: pages with a real photo of the author convert better than pages without one. The photo doesn’t have to be professional. A clear, recent, friendly photo is enough on its own.
If you genuinely won’t show your face, an illustration or a signature graphic is the next best thing. A blank avatar is the worst option available.
How this works in WordPress
WordPress generates an author archive automatically at yoursite.com/author/your-username/. The default version is barebones.
To upgrade it, you generally have three options:
Option 1: Use your theme’s author page features
Many modern blog themes ship with custom author archive layouts. Aurora, for instance, includes four different author page layouts along with the ability to add social links to an author profile directly, so you can build a genuinely useful author page without touching a single template file. Look in your own theme’s settings for “Author Layout” or “Author Page” options if you’re using something else.
Option 2: Create a manual “About” page
Build a standalone page at yoursite.com/about/ with full control over the layout. Link to it from your menu, and use this as your real author page. We cover this approach in detail in how to write a blog About page that doesn’t feel like a resume. Leave the auto-generated author archive alone, or hide it via navigation, once your About page is doing the real work.
Option 3: Use a plugin
Plugins like Simple Author Box or Co-Authors Plus can extend the default author archive. Useful for multi-author blogs in particular.
For most single-author blogs, options 1 and 2 are stronger than option 3. A standalone About page or theme-native author layout that you fully control beats a plugin-extended author archive most of the time.
What goes on a multi-author blog
If multiple people write for your blog, each author needs their own page. The structure stays the same, bio, best posts, and a way to follow, just scoped to that individual author. A multi-author blog with strong individual author pages can convert more subscribers overall than a single-author blog, simply because each writer brings their own following along with them.
This is also where the theme’s author-page support matters most. If you have ten contributors, you don’t want to hand-build ten About pages one at a time. The theme should generate strong author archives automatically instead.
The “Start Here” page question
Some bloggers build a dedicated “Start Here” page that’s separate from their About page. This works well when the bio and the curated post list are both long enough to feel like two different things. Smaller blogs can combine both onto one page instead. Either approach is fine.
How to know if your author page is working
Two metrics matter most here:
- Email signups attributed to the author page. If you have analytics that track signup source, this should be the second or third highest source after blog posts themselves.
- Time on page. A good author page holds visitors for at least 30 to 60 seconds. Under 15 seconds generally means they bounced without reading.
If either metric is low, the page isn’t doing its job yet. The most common fix is reducing what’s on the page down to the three things that actually matter.
Why this page is worth the effort
Author pages are high-intent traffic, treated like default WordPress junk on most blogs. Replace the default with a curated page that introduces you in human terms, surfaces your best work, and invites a follow. Use a real photo, keep to one clear call to action, and revisit the page yearly as your best work changes. This single page is one of the best subscriber sources a blogger has, and it costs almost nothing to fix.
