Simple Author Box icon

Simple Author Box

by WebFactory

View on WordPress.org
83 Quality Score
Active Installs
22/30

With 90,000 active installs, Simple Author Box is by a wide margin the most installed plugin in its category, earning a strong popularity score of 74.

Update Freshness
25/25

The plugin was updated as recently as May 2026 and is tested against WordPress 7.0, which gives it a perfect maintenance score and suggests an actively maintained codebase.

User Rating
13/15

The user rating of 86 out of 100 from 114 reviews indicates a generally favourable reception, though the sample size is modest.

Support Health
8/15

Only 1 support thread exists in the data set and it was resolved, which is fine but offers very little signal about how the developer handles real-world troubleshooting.

WP Compatibility
15/15

Compatibility is a perfect score, with PHP 5.6 and WordPress 4.6 as minimums and confirmed testing against WordPress 7.0, covering an extremely wide range of hosting environments.

Scores higher than 89% of indexed plugins

About

Add a responsive author box or guest author box with social icons to any post. Great author box for any site!

Active Installs 90k+
Rating ★★★★ 4.3/5
Last Updated 2026-08-16 7:40pm GMT
Requires WordPress 4.6+
Tested Up To 7.1
Requires PHP 5.6+

Security History

3 known vulnerabilities, all patched
3 Medium

Most recent: July 24, 2023

View details ▸

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What It Does

Simple Author Box automatically appends a responsive author bio box to the bottom of your WordPress posts, pulling the avatar, bio, and social media links from each user's profile. It also lets you create guest author profiles that are not tied to a WordPress user account, which is handy when you publish content from contributors who do not log into your site. The display can be tweaked with a few layout and colour options from the settings screen.

Who It's For

This plugin is a good fit for bloggers, magazine-style sites, and multi-author publications that want a quick, no-fuss way to credit writers and link to their social profiles. It also suits guest posting communities and content marketing agencies that frequently publish under bylines from people who are not registered users on the site. Anyone running a single-author personal blog will also find it useful, though the guest author feature is overkill for that use case.

Who Should Skip It

If you need co-authors, multi-author bylines, or complex attribution across a single post, this plugin is not the right tool, since its core focus is a single author box per post. Sites that already use a full authorship or editorial workflow plugin such as PublishPress Authors or Molongui Authorship should not add Simple Author Box on top, as the overlap will cause conflicts and duplicate boxes.

The Bottom Line

Simple Author Box earns a quality score of 82.59 out of 100 and delivers exactly what its name promises: a clean, responsive author box with social icons and guest author support. Its 90,000 installs and recent maintenance activity make it a safe default choice for standard blogs and multi-author sites that do not need co-author functionality. For sites requiring multi-author bylines, deeper editorial tooling, or visually integrated layouts for page builders like Divi, one of the alternatives will serve you better.

Tags

author bio author box Author Profile author social icons guest author