Why does WordPress use my username in the URL of my author archive page?

WordPress stores four different names for each user:

1. Username
2. First and Last Name
3. Nickname
4. Display name publicly as

You can find and edit these in your Profile. Most notably, every user should change their nickname to something other than their username. If a user's nickname is the same as their username, it makes it very easy for a hacker to exploit. To your question... yes, for some reason, WordPress still uses the author's username in the author's archive page URL. e.g., https://yoursite.com/author/username But overriding this default behavior can be a little tricky. You can install the Edit Author Slug plugin, which gives you complete control of your user permalinks, allowing you to change both the author base (the ‘/author/’ portion of the author URLs), and the author slug (which defaults to the username of the author). But it's important to note that changing the author base and/or slugs on an established website can negatively impact your site's SEO, particularly if your author archives have been indexed by search engines. If you simply change the URL structure, your visitors will see a 404 error message when they visit your site from search engines. To avoid this, you'll also need to set up redirects from the old URLs to your new author base and/or slug. The Redirection plugin can help you create and manage those redirects. If it's a more complicated task than you feel like tackling on your own, or you don't want to risk messing up your site's SEO, I'd recommend hiring a WordPress coder who can knock this out for you safely. Hope this helps!