Whoever first installs WordPress is usually confused about how to proceed. There are so many things to do, and it is a little tricky to understand which WordPress settings to start with. Installing WordPress themes and building your website is an important step.
Downloading plugins that ensure better performance of your site is equally important. However, before you move on to these steps, there are a few basic settings that you should be doing once you’ve installed WordPress.
In this article, let us look at the most important settings that will help you set up your blog or website properly.
General Settings
The first thing that you’d do is go to your Dashboard, and click on ‘Settings’. Then go to General Settings. In your general settings, you will change your site title, add a tagline if you want, change your time zone to the area in which you operate, and select a date and time format that you like. Once you’ve added/changed these details, hit save.
Reading Settings
Once you’ve set these general attributes, go back to ‘Settings’ and click on the ‘Reading’ tab. Here, you can choose the type of the front page that you want to display. If you’re predominantly a blogging website, you’d want to show your latest blogposts on your front page.
In that case, choose the ‘Your Latest Post’ option. In case you don’t want your latest blogs to show on your front page, you can choose the ‘A static page’ option.
Media Settings
Another important thing to do is fix your media settings. It is always better to have images of the same size, and pixels on your websites. It ensures consistency, as all your media is uniform.
Go to Media Settings, and select the default width and height of your media images. This will prevent making changes in your media dimensions every time you upload one.
Set Permalink
On WordPress, you can create a custom URL for your permalinks and archives. A default permalink will be something like ‘http://yourdomainname.com/?p=123’. Since these types of URLs are not very SEO friendly, you would want to customize it to make it search engine friendly.
Go to your ‘Permalink Settings’, and choose one among the several default options available. I would recommend you to go for a post name URL.
Delete Unused Themes and Default Posts
WordPress comes with a default page, post and comment. These are basically just examples of how a post, page or comment would look like. Once you’re familiar with this, you can delete these default examples, as you’d not want them to appear on your site forever.
Another thing that you should be doing is to delete any unused themes that you’d have stocked. This is because even if a theme is not used, it would require an update. You don’t want to waste your time on that in the future. So, it is better to delete any themes that you’re not going to use.
Install Important Plugins
Once you’ve done all your basic settings, it is important to install some basic plugins.
WordPress is a robust content management system. Not everybody is a skilled web designer. However, WordPress is very user friendly and easy to manage. An understanding of the basic WordPress settings helps you move ahead smoothly.
If you’re looking forward to building a smart, well-functioning website, these are some of the most basic things to do.
These are some great tips, it can be hard to know what to do when you are new to wordpress or even when you have been there a while remembering to do everything.
What a great list of tips for improving your WordPress blog! I love that WordPress is very user friendly and easy to manage!
though i use blogger,im planning on switiching to wordpress,thanks for sharing.
Plugins are a must. I would recommend testing how they affect your site speed though.