TrustBio — Author Credentials, Medical Reviewer Bylines & Author Box

Description

Google does not just want to know who wrote your health article. It wants to know who checked it, what they are qualified to say, and when they last looked.

TrustBio puts that on the page and in your structured data. Attach a real credential to an author — MD, RN, JD, CPA — with the issuing body, licence number and a public verification URL. Name a separate reviewer. Stamp the date the content was last reviewed. TrustBio renders it as a byline readers trust, and emits the matching hasCredential and reviewedBy JSON-LD for search engines.

Written by Dr. Jane Smith, MD · Medically reviewed by Alex Rivera, RN · Last reviewed 14 March 2026

If you publish health, legal, or financial content, that line is not decoration. It is the credibility signal readers look for, and the one search engines increasingly expect on Your Money or Your Life topics. A name, a bio and a row of social icons do not carry that signal. A structured credential does: the qualification, the body that issued it, the licence number, a public verification URL, and an expiry date — written into the page and into your structured data, so a reader and a search engine are told the same thing.

What makes TrustBio different

• Structured credentials, not a text field. 13 credential types plus custom, each with an issuing body, licence number and verification URL.
• Credentials that expire. Set an expiry date and TrustBio hides the credential automatically, on the page and in the schema, so your site never claims a lapsed qualification.
• Reviewers as a first-class concept. “Medically Reviewed By” is not a label you type — it is an author category that maps to the reviewedBy schema property.
• A last-reviewed date on every post, with the reviewer named and their credentials shown.
• hasCredential, reviewedBy and knowsAbout JSON-LD on top of the usual Person markup.

And the fundamentals are all here too: co-authors, guest authors, custom profile fields, box position, typography, colours and author archive pages are all in the free plugin. There is no licence key, no account, no trial, and no feature that stops working after a while.

🎓 Credential Badges

The reason to choose TrustBio.

• Attach professional credentials to any author: MD, PhD, RN, MBA, JD, CPA and more, plus any custom credential you need
• Record the issuing body, licence number and a public verification URL so a reader can check the claim themselves
• Optional expiry dates — an expired credential disappears from the page and from the schema automatically
• Credential labels appear beside the author name on every box and bar layout
• Each credential is emitted as its own hasCredential JSON-LD entry
• Choose per credential whether it shows as a visible badge, in the schema, or both

🏷️ Author Categories — “Written By” vs “Reviewed By”

Your editorial process has roles. TrustBio makes them real.

• Create the roles you actually use: Medical Reviewer, Clinical Reviewer (RN), Fact-Checker, Editor, Contributing Writer
• Each category carries its own display label — “Written By”, “Medically Reviewed By”, “Fact-Checked By”
• Each category maps to a schema.org property: author, reviewedBy, contributor or editor
• Assign several people with different roles to the same post, and each is attributed correctly in the markup

🗓️ Last Review Bars

• Show the reviewer’s name, their credentials, and the exact date the content was last reviewed
• 2 layouts: Classic Bar and Minimal Inline, or render it as plain inline text inside the author box
• Set the review date, reviewer and a custom label per post, right in the editor
• Auto-insert before or after content, or place it with [trustbio_review]
• Configurable stale threshold, plus a dashboard widget listing every post that is overdue for review

📐 Author Schema / JSON-LD

• schema.org/Person structured data for every author on every post
• hasCredential entries for each verified, unexpired credential
• reviewedBy for content reviewers
• sameAs array built automatically from the author’s social profiles
• knowsAbout on author archive pages, as part of ProfilePage schema
• Yoast SEO and Rank Math compatibility — TrustBio detects them and merges, rather than emitting a second author node

👤 Author Boxes

• 4 layouts with a live-preview builder: Classic Byline, Card Simple, Minimal Inline, and Quote Card
• 33 styling controls: accent colour, background, border, font sizes, avatar size and shape, and more
• Assign multiple co-authors to any post and drag to reorder them
• Per-post options to hide the box, or use a different box design
• Auto-insert after content, before content, both, or place it yourself with a shortcode or the Gutenberg block

👥 Author Profiles

• Profile editor with General, Avatar, Social and SEO tabs
• 31 built-in social and profile fields: Twitter/X, LinkedIn, GitHub, ORCID, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, ResearchGate and more
• Add your own custom profile fields
• Guest author support — full profiles for contributors who have no WordPress account
• Custom avatar upload with Gravatar fallback
• Author archive pages at a URL base you choose, e.g. yoursite.com/authors/dr-jane
• Completeness progress bar on the Authors list, so you can see which profiles still need a photo, bio, job title, social link, credential or expertise topic

🧭 Author Expertise Topics

• Tag an author with the WordPress categories they actually know about
• Outputs knowsAbout structured data on their archive page

🧩 Editor & Developer Integration

• Gutenberg sidebar panel with author search and assignment
• Gutenberg author-box block
• Classic Editor meta box
• Quick Edit and Bulk Edit support
• REST API endpoint at /wp-json/trustbio/v1/authors
• Full JSON export and import of every TrustBio table — import is non-destructive

⚙️ Feature Modules

Not every site needs everything. The Features screen lets you switch off any module you are not using — a disabled module removes its menu items, unregisters its AJAX handlers and stops injecting output. Nothing is locked; this is a workflow preference, not a paywall.

Shortcodes

Author Box — [trustbio]
[trustbio] — author box for the current post
[trustbio id=”5″] — a specific author by TrustBio ID
[trustbio slug=”dr-jane-smith”] — a specific author by slug
[trustbio box=”Compact”] — use a specific author box by its title
[trustbio category=”medical-reviewer”] — only authors in a given category

Last Review Bar — [trustbio_review]
[trustbio_review] — review bar for the current post
[trustbio_review post_id=”42″] — review bar for a specific post
[trustbio_review style=”inline”] — inline text instead of a bar
[trustbio_review label=”Fact-checked by”] — override the label for this instance

Who this is for

• Health and medical publishers — “Written By [Author, MD]”, “Medically Reviewed By [Reviewer, RN]”, with licence numbers on file and a verification URL for each
• Legal sites — author plus legal reviewer plus compliance officer, each with their bar admission on record
• Finance and insurance — author plus CPA or CFP reviewer, with credentials that expire when the certification does
• Clinics, hospitals and practices — a named clinician behind every piece of patient-facing advice
• Addiction and recovery — medical director, clinical supervisor and recovery coach, each attributed correctly
• News and media — author, editor and fact-checker, each mapped to the right schema property
• Any multi-author site — a clear, auditable record of who wrote and who reviewed every piece of content

Privacy

TrustBio adds no analytics, no tracking and no external CDN dependency, and all social icons are bundled locally as inline SVG. Everything you enter stays in your own WordPress database.

There is one outbound request, and it is the avatar fallback: when an author has no uploaded photo, their Gravatar is requested, which sends a hashed form of their email address to Gravatar — the same request WordPress already makes for user avatars. Upload a photo for every author and no request is made. See “External Services” below for the full detail.

The only outbound request TrustBio can make is the standard Gravatar avatar request WordPress itself makes — see “External Services” below.

TrustBio Pro

Everything above is free, for any number of sites, with no account and no key. Nothing in this plugin is locked, time-limited or switched off later.

For teams that need more there is TrustBio Pro, a separate add-on that installs alongside this plugin. None of its code ships here — this plugin does not contain disabled Pro features waiting for a licence.

What the add-on adds, against what the free plugin already does:

• NPI Registry verification — free lets you type a verification URL; Pro checks the claim against the CMS registry
• Credential change log — free keeps no record of credential edits; Pro logs every change with who made it
• Credential audit — a dated, exportable record of every credential and its status that day
• Expiry reminders — free hides a lapsed credential; Pro emails you before it lapses
• Reviewer workflow — free displays a review; Pro requests one by a date and chases it
• Content review scheduler — recurring review cycles across the whole library
• Front-end profile editing — authors update their own profile without an admin account
• Author health and leaderboard — a composite E-E-A-T score per author, ranked
• Deeper medical schema — Physician and MedicalWebPage types for YMYL sites
• ORCID publications — pulls an author’s publication list from their ORCID iD
• Disclosure blocks — reusable funding, conflict-of-interest and disclaimer statements
• Team directory — a single “our team” page, grouped and filterable
• Sidebar author boxes — a widget and shortcode with their own builder
• Elementor integration — a TrustBio section in Elementor’s Document Settings
• Author importers — one-click import from Co-Authors Plus, PublishPress Authors, Molongui and CSV

Details are on the TrustBio → TrustBio Pro screen inside the plugin.

For Developers

Action hooks:

• trustbio_before_box / trustbio_after_box — before and after each author box
• trustbio_register_admin_pages — add submenu pages to the TrustBio menu
• trustbio_register_admin_hooks / trustbio_register_public_hooks / trustbio_register_cron_hooks
• trustbio_settings_panels / trustbio_settings_saved
• trustbio_dashboard_panels — add panels to the Overview screen

Filters:

• trustbio_box_output — the complete box HTML
• trustbio_box_layouts / trustbio_box_templates / trustbio_box_template_dir — register your own box layouts
• trustbio_review_bar_layouts / trustbio_review_bar_template_dir — register your own review bar layouts
• trustbio_social_fields / trustbio_author_fields — add or remove profile fields
• trustbio_schema_data — the schema data array before output
• trustbio_review_label — the default review label string
• trustbio_feature_modules — register a module on the Features screen

Every extension point is documented in includes/class-pro-bridge.php.

External Services

Gravatar — author avatar fallback

When an author has no custom photo uploaded, TrustBio displays their Gravatar. This is the same request WordPress itself makes for user avatars.

• What is sent: a hashed (MD5) version of the author’s email address, and the requested image size.
• When it is sent: only when an author box is displayed on the frontend and that author has no custom photo.
• Who receives it: Automattic Inc., operator of Gravatar.
• Service URL: https://gravatar.com/
• Privacy Policy: https://automattic.com/privacy/
• Terms of Service: https://wordpress.com/tos/ (Automattic’s terms, which cover Gravatar)

To stop all Gravatar requests, upload a custom photo for every author on their profile page.

Google Rich Results Test — convenience link only (no data sent)

The author SEO tab includes a link to Google’s Rich Results Test. Clicking it opens Google’s website in a new browser tab. TrustBio itself sends nothing.

• Service URL: https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
• Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
• Terms of Service: https://policies.google.com/terms

Freemius checkout — upgrade link only (no data sent)

The “TrustBio Pro” screen in the plugin’s own admin menu describes the separate paid add-on and links to its checkout page, which is operated by Freemius, the vendor’s payment provider. Clicking it opens that page in a new browser tab. TrustBio itself sends nothing: the link carries no query string, no site address and no account information, and the plugin makes no request to Freemius at any time. The screen is not registered at all once the paid add-on is installed and licensed.

• Service URL: https://checkout.freemius.com/plugin/44707/plan/78805/
• Operated by: Freemius, Inc.
• Privacy Policy: https://freemius.com/privacy/
• Terms of Service: https://freemius.com/terms/

CMS NPI Registry — verification link only (no data sent)

When you record an NPI number on a credential, TrustBio builds a link to that provider’s public entry in the US National Plan & Provider Enumeration System, so a reader can verify the clinician themselves. The link is stored with the credential and rendered on your own page. TrustBio never contacts the registry — no request is made and no data is sent.

• Service URL: https://npiregistry.cms.hhs.gov/
• Operated by: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, a US government agency
• Privacy Policy: https://www.cms.gov/privacy
• Terms of Service: the NPI Registry does not publish one. It is a US government
  service and its records are public information; CMS publishes the privacy
  policy linked above instead.

Leave the NPI field blank and no such link is ever built.

JSON-LD structured data — self-hosted, no external call

TrustBio outputs JSON-LD in <script type="application/ld+json"> tags in your page HTML, which crawlers read like any other HTML. It includes only the fields you have entered: author name, job title, bio, website URL, social profile URLs and verified credentials. There is no outbound HTTP request and no third party involved.