WordPress is powerful … but occasionally you’ll hit a problem where you hunt for hours online trying to find a solution. You may find plenty of other people searching for the some thing too, but no decent answers.
For me searching for how to use update_user_meta display_name to change the default display name when a new user creates an account was one of those searches.
In case you’re struggling with this too, hopefully this quick post will help you.
Firstly the problem:
When a new user registers on the front end of your site, WordPress often decides to make the user name their display name. Which doesn’t give the user a good experience. Depending on the site I’m developing, I prefer to have the display name set to Firstname Lastname or just Firstname.
update_user_meta
In WordPress the update_user_meta() function can be used to update a user’s first_name, billing_first_name, nickname and many other fields. So it would be natural to expect to be able to update their display_name the same way, right?
Well unfortunately display_name can’t be updated with update_user_meta.
Use pre_user_display_name instead
The pre_user_display_name hook filters a user’s display name before the user is created or updated. That’s what we need to use.
Here’s example code I used when I had added a “First Name” field to the registration form. I wanted the display name to be set as their first name.
Note – This was on a WooCommerce site, and the name of the first field on the registration form was “billing_first_name”. This can work on any WordPress site – you just need to find what the name of the field is on the form.
This was the html on the registration form – you can see that “billing_first_name” was the name of the form field on the registration form where they inserted their first name.
<input class="input-text" name="billing_first_name" type="text" value="" />
This code was added into my functions.php file in my child theme, which sets the display name to be the first name.
add_filter('pre_user_display_name','default_display_name');
function default_display_name($name) {
if ( isset( $_POST['billing_first_name'] ) ) {
$name = sanitize_text_field( $_POST['billing_first_name'] );
}
return $name;
}
Or alternatively, if you want the display name to be “firstname lastname” use this code:
add_filter('pre_user_display_name','default_display_name');
function default_display_name($name) {
if ( isset( $_POST['billing_first_name'] ) ) {
$firstname = sanitize_text_field( $_POST['billing_first_name'] );
}
if ( isset( $_POST['billing_last_name'] ) ) {
$lastname = sanitize_text_field( $_POST['billing_last_name'] );
}
$name = $firstname . ' ' . $lastname;
return $name;
}
Has this article been helpful? Please leave a comment below.
If you would like to know how to add extra fields to your WooCommerce registration page here is a great article >
