Prevent 404 of Author pages without posts

Why should you get redirected to the 404 page if you display an author archive without posts? This isn’t the default behavior of WordPress.

For example, if you go to the following URL:

http://example.com/{permalink_base}/author/{author_name}

WordPress calls the author.php template inside your theme folder. There you have a loop which will return all posts of the author {author_name}. If this user has no posts, the loop will return nothing and will not redirect to the 404.php template.

So you have to options:

1. Look in your themes author.php file what’s going on there
2. Check if the user really exists in WordPress. You have to use the username and not the display or nicename inside the URL.