Changes show up in view source but not live site

You are echoing the author link generator inside an already opened anchor tag, which is causing error. Try this code:

Method 1

<?php if ( !is_page() ) :
        $author_posts_url = the_author_link();
            $posts_by_title   = sprintf(
            __( 'Posts by %1$s ( @%2$s )', 'p2-breathe' ),
            get_the_author_meta( 'display_name' ),
            get_the_author_meta( 'user_nicename' )
        ); ?>
    <a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/251479/<?php echo esc_url( $author_posts_url ); ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( $posts_by_title ); ?>" class="author-avatar">
        <?php echo get_avatar( $author_posts_url ); ?>
    </a>
    <?php endif; ?>

    <div class="entry-meta">
        <?php if ( ! is_page() ) : ?>
            <a href="<?php echo get_author_posts_url(); ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( $posts_by_title ); ?>" class="entry-author"><?php the_author(); ?></a>
        <?php endif; ?>
        <span class="entry-date">

Noticed that i replaced echo esc_url( the_author_link() ); with get_author_posts_url() which will only return the URL, not a full anchor.

You may also want to use get_author_posts_url(the_author_ID()) if the code didn’t work at the first place.

Method 2

If you are not running this code in a loop and don’t have access to the author ID, you can change the following line:

<a href="https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/251479/<?php echo esc_url( the_author_link() ); ?>" title="<?php echo esc_attr( $posts_by_title ); ?>" class="entry-author"><?php the_author(); ?></a>

to:

<?php the_author_link(); ?>

Which will still return a link to author page, but without class="entry-author" which i don’t think would be a great deal since you can tweak your css to achieve the same result.

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