Best author bio box plugins for wordpress

An author bio box is an important part of a WordPress based website . You can give any author a “face” by showing a foto of him (or her). The author bio box usually gives a brief introduction about the author/writer/blogger and should make it as easy as possible to connect to the author (i.e. email / twitter / facebook) . To quickly connect with any visitor the standard bio box deployed by WordPress is not enough for most website owners. Fortunately there are many free plugins to extend or replace the functionality of the author bio box.

What a good author bio box plugin for your wordpress website should provide:

• Easy way to update central information for the authors / writer on the wordpress blog
• The authors image should be either pulled from gravatar or manually uploaded
• Ideally the bio box provides more posts from the same author
• The bio box plugin should have more than – let’s say: 1000 downloads on wordpress.org ?
• An average rating of 4 or better (applies to wordpress.org and themeforest / codecanyon)
  

Free author bio plugins for wordpress

WP Author Box Lite — WordPress Plugins

WP Author Box Lite — WordPress Plugins Give identity to your blog posts, pages and custom post types! Author Box Lite creates responsive profile and latest posts box to increase reader engagement. This also automatically add google+ profile authorship. Design your wordpress author box to match your theme by simple selecting colors via color picker. All elements are adjustable

Here is how it looked like when I activated.

What I really liked about WP Author Box Lite is that it covered all my requirements like Gravatar Image and related posts from the same author. Although the plugin deserves a better preview image on wordpress.org – I give my thumbs up. Please note that there is also a premium plugin version of WP Author box on Codecanyon which give you even more options to tweek its design.

Starbox – the Author Box for Humans — WordPress Plugins

Starbox – the Author Box for Humans — WordPress Plugins Humans look at beauty more than anything else (as you most probably already know, men and women alike). That’s why you’ll get an Author Box that’s gorgeous to look at and it makes your readers click all the way through to see more about the Authors.
Now, if you have just yourself as an Author on your site, or a super-star team of Authors, you’ll love Starbox. You can choose from the professionaly built themes and landscaping. If you are the super-star type, or want to boost social proof, place your Author Box on top of the page, so that your Human readers will know that they’re reading stuff that a real awesome person has written.

We have used the Starbox Author Bio plugin at one of our main websites (astiga.com) as we published content from many authors. This is how it looks like

WP Author Bio  is a bio box plugin that allows you to modify almost any aspect of the boxes design you like. The downside of this flexibility: it looked awful on my blog at first. I had to tune and tweek several settings of the plugin to fit it into my blogs design.

WP Author Bio — WordPress Plugins

WP Author Bio — WordPress Plugins The author bio box is responsive and includes five sexy social icon sets to choose from, with support for all the following social networks: Behance, Blogger, Delicious, DeviantArt, Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, RSS, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, Yahoo! & YouTube.

As long as you don’t mind taking your time to change the design and the setttings of the plugin and if you are looking for a feature-heavy plugin then WP Author Bio is for you.

The next author bio box plugin that was recommended to me so I don’t wanna go over it – although I was a little disappointed about it:

Guerrilla’s Author Box — WordPress Plugins

Guerrilla’s Author Box — WordPress Plugins This is a plugin that adds an author box to the end of your posts, showing off the authors name, description, website link and gravatar powered avatar.

Guerillas Author Box does little more than pulling your image from gravatar and display the links to your social profiles – that’s it.

One last free plugin that looked nice and shiny on wordpress.org is “simple author box”. Unfortunately it did not work at all in my blog.

Simple Author Box — WordPress Plugins

Simple Author Box — WordPress Plugins Simple Author Box adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author gravatar and author description. It also adds over 30 social profile fields on WordPress user profile screen, allowing to display the author social icons.

 

 

 

Just in case you are running a blog with multiple authors or a larger magazine-like site, you might use “co-authors plus” from wordpress.org. It allows you to add multiple authors to one post – in case you want to give credits to several writers/bloggers/authors for one post:

Co-Authors Plus — WordPress Plugins

Co-Authors Plus — WordPress Plugins Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types via a search-as-you-type input box. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s archive page and in their feed. Co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is core behavior). Add writers as bylines without creating WordPress user accounts. Simply create a guest author profile for the writer and assign the byline as you normally would.

 

Premium / Paid author bio plugins

WP – Author Box by phpbits | CodeCanyon

WP – Author Box by phpbits | CodeCanyon A very useful WordPress profile plugin that can be easily customised to match your current and favourite themes. Increase user engagement by adding unlimited custom tabs with custom content, recent post types entries and even contact form supports. Your ultimate WordPress Author Box plugin that also comes with custom widgets that you can user perfectly on any of your sidebars and footer widgets.

 

One of the best selling author bio plugins on CodeCanyon is “fanciest Author Box” from ThematoSoup. It’s sold for 18 US-$.

Fanciest Author Box by ThematoSoup | CodeCanyon

Fanciest Author Box by ThematoSoup | CodeCanyon This premium author bio plugin is very easy to use and customize. Right after installation the author bio is, by default, enabled on all your posts, pages and custom post types. You can disable the author box where you don’t want it or implement it manually using. Fanciest Author Box allows readers to learn about authors and connect with them on all major social networks.
It has an outstanding rating of 4,45 (of 5 ) stars on Codecanyon.

 

The fancy Author Box Plugin allows you to tweek literally every aspect of your bio box. Just in case you are not satisfied with the free plugins above – just give it a try.

Conclusion:

There are a lot of free plugins on wordpress.org that allow you to change the look and feel of your auhtors bio box. If you want to go with a premium bio plugin you might go with “fanciest author box” which is sold more than 3.500 times on Codecanyon or the premium version of WP Author Box which also sells at Envato.

After I changed the wordpress theme of my personal blog at wordpress-expert.info to the genesis framework I had to look for a author box plugin myself. After Itesting  more that 10 of them I choose to go with WP Author Box Lite (the free version) as it gave me the ease of use and simplicity while providing the maximum features (gravatar image, social media icons and related post).

Which author bio box plugin do you use in your blog? Leave a comment below and let use know.