I know, you have just set-up your first WordPress website manually or the one-click install from your web host account. After creating a WP site, you need some settings and important task to complete before making it live.
Even your WordPress site is developed by a website developer, please check whether these changes have been made to your blog/website.
These changes are related to WP Themes, Plugins and WordPress settings which boost your site speed, make professional design, increase security level, monitor SEO performance and track your live visitors.
Some changes are very important and you should made it. Some of these settings are recommended that you may apply on your site and others things are required depending on the type of your site.
What next Immediately after installation of WP site
Have you installed WordPress? Following are the basic as well as advanced level settings for a newly created WP website. Here you able to know how to configure WordPress Settings.
WordPress Settings
The WordPress Settings Tab is accessible only by Admin users. After login at https://www.YourSiteDomain.com/admin you will see Setting tab in Admin sidebar.
It is the central hub to configure all settings for different sections of a WordPress website. Further, you may also see settings related to many WordPress Plugins under the WP setting panel.
WordPress settings are broadly divided into 7 Types i.e. General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Permalinks and Privacy. Each of theme are discussed separately hereunder:
General Settings
First of all, we will discuss about general setting. After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> General Settings. See the screenshot below:-
Site Title: Enter your website or blog name. Recommended to keep it single word like Showeblogin or maximum 50 characters long. It may be your brand name.
You may use your domain name here. Most of the time website owner keeps site name and domain name same. Mostly WP theme support it and displays site name at the top of every page. It will help to identify your site by users.
Tagline: Provide an eye-catching short description for your site. I will suggest you to keep it maximum up to 160 characters.
You may call it as your site slogan. Actually, you should write your website tagline that explain what your site is about. For example our site excerpt is “Super Web Tricks on Website, Blogging, Social Media and Making Money Online.”.
WordPress Address (URL): There is no need to change it. Keep in mind that it is WordPress Address and not Website Address. Thus, enter the complete URL of the directory containing your WordPress core application files.
In other words, it may be https://example.us (If WP installed in root directory) or https://example.us/forum (in case you installed WP into a directory called “forum”)
Site Address (URL): It is also not required to edit. Generally it is your domain name that people type in their browser to visit your site. https://example.us
Note: After WP installation, both URLs (WordPress Address and Site Address) filled up by default (https://www.SuperWebTricks.com) and there is no need to change it.
Administration Email Address: This email is used to send notification from WordPress regarding the administration and maintenance of your WordPress site.
You may use different email address (other than admin email). If you change this, you will get an email at your new address to confirm it. The new address will not become active until confirmed.
Membership: If you want to disable the registration (Sign Up) on your site, uncheck “Anyone can register“. No visitor will be able to create account on your website. Check this checkbox if you want anyone to be able to register an account on your site.
New User Default Role: You may select the default Role that is assigned to new users. Available options are Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor and Subscriber.
Site Language: This option is useful for changing the WordPress dashboard language. By default selected (installed) language will be English (United States).
Timezone: Choose either a city in the same timezone as you or a manual UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) time offset. Click the Save Changes button and the UTC time and “Local time” will display to confirm the correct Timezone was selected.
Date Format: The format in which to display dates on your site. The Date Format setting is intended to be used by theme designers in displaying dates on your site, but does not control how the date is displayed in the Administrative Screens (e.g. Manage Posts). Click the Save Changes button and the “Output” example below will show the current date in the format entered.
Note: See Formatting Date and Time for some of the formats available.
Time Format: The format in which you want to display times on your site. The time format setting is intended to be used by theme designers in displaying time on your site. Click the Save Changes button and the “Output” example below will show the current time in the format entered.
Note that it does not control how the time is displayed in the Administrative Screens (e.g. Write Post edit of timestamp).
Week Starts On: Select your preferred start date for WordPress calendars from the drop-down box. Monday is the default setting for this drop-down, meaning a monthly calendar will show Monday in the first column.
If you want your calendar to show Sunday or any other day as the first column, then select accordingly from the drop-down.
Click the Save Changes button to ensure any changes you have made to your general settings are saved to your site database.
Once you click the button, a confirmation text box will appear at the top of the page telling you your settings have been saved.
Writing Settings
After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> Click on Writing Settings. See the snapshot below:-
In writing settings, you will find the option for default post category and post format. It also control optional functions like remote publishing, Post via e-mail and Update Services. Here we discuss each of theme separately.
Default Post Category: This feature helps you to set default post category for your new post. The Category you select from this drop-down is called the default post Category.
That means while you are writing your post and failed to assign any other category then the default post category will be assigned to that post.
Further, if you delete a Category, all posts in that deleted category will automatically be assigned the default post Category.
Therefore, you may select a category as a default Category which you use frequently or going to write more post related to that Category.
Default Post Format: The Post Format you select from this drop-down is called the default Post Format. Post Formats are used by themes to create different styling for different types of posts. This settings is only visible if the current activated theme supports Post Formats. The WordPress default theme is an example of a theme that supports various Post Formats including Standard (no special format), Aside, and Gallery.
Post via email: With this option, you can set up your blog to publish e-mails as blog posts. To do this, you would send an e-mail to a specific address you’ve established for the purpose. More than likely, you will need the help of your web host and/or your e-mail provider.
This messages is displayed at the beginning of this section: “To post to WordPress by e-mail you must set up a secret e-mail account with POP3 access.
Any mail received at this address will be posted, so it’s a good idea to keep this address very secret. Here are three random strings you could use: FKZXx8EK, P6snQ5Lq, YcrfBw03.”
Complete the following fields to post by e-mail:
- Mail Server: A mail server receives e-mails on your behalf and stores them for retrieval. Your mail server will have a URI address, such as mail.example.com, which you should enter here.
- Port: Servers usually use port 110 to receive requests related to emails. If your mail server uses a different port, enter that port number here.
- Login Name: If, for example, the e-mail address that you will be using for the writing by e-mail feature is wordpress@example.com, then ‘wordpress’ is the Login name.
- Password: Enter the password for the above e-mail address here. Three possible passwords are displayed by WordPress in the introduction section of this Screen.
- Default Mail Category: WordPress will assign this Category to all of the posts published via the Post by e-mail feature. Note: You can create new Categories in Administration > Posts > Categories.
- Update Services: When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the update services of the sites listed in the box. For more about this, see Update Services on the Codex. When entering services, separate multiple URIs with line breaks.
Click the Save Changes button to ensure any changes you have made to your writing settings are saved to your website database.
Reading Settings
After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> Click on Reading Settings. See the screenshot below:-
- Your homepage displays: You may set to display your latest posts or a static page on home page of your site.
- Blog pages show at most: You may decide how many posts shall be displayed on your home page.
- Syndication feeds show the most recent: You have option to limit the posts to be shown in the feeds of your website.
- For each post in a feed, include: Choose either to display full post or excerpt (description) of your post in the feed.
- Search engine visibility: If you want to make your site private then just check/tick the box. It will discourage search engines (Google, Yahoo, bing etc.) from indexing your site. However, it is up to search engines to honor this request.
Discussion Settings
After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> Click on Discussion Settings. See the snapshot below:-
- Default post settings
- Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the post
- Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts
- Allow people to submit comments on new posts
- Individual posts may override these settings. Changes here will only be applied to new posts.
- Other comment settings
- Comment author must fill out name and email
- Users must be registered and logged in to comment
- Automatically close comments on posts older than 14 days
- Show comments cookies opt-in checkbox, allowing comment author cookies to be set
- Enable threaded (nested) comments 5 levels deep
- Break comments into pages with 50 top level comments per page and the last/first page displayed by default
- Comments should be displayed with the older/newer comments at the top of each page
- Email me whenever
- Anyone posts a comment
- A comment is held for moderation
- Before a comment appears
- Comment must be manually approved
- Comment author must have a previously approved comment
- Comment Moderation
- Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 2 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)
When a comment contains any of these words in its content, author name, URL, email, IP address, or browser’s user agent string, it will be held in the moderation queue. One word or IP address per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”
- Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 2 or more links. (A common characteristic of comment spam is a large number of hyperlinks.)
- Disallowed Comment Keys: When a comment contains any of these words in its content, author name, URL, email, IP address, or browser’s user agent string, it will be put in the Trash. One word or IP address per line. It will match inside words, so “press” will match “WordPress”.
- Avatars: An avatar is an image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on avatar enabled sites. Here you can enable the display of avatars for people who comment on your site.
Media Settings
After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> Click on Media Settings. See the screenshot below:-
WordPress provides you facility to set the maximum dimensions in pixels to use when adding or uploading an image file to the Media Library.
- Image sizes
- Thumbnail size: (default 150px x 150px max)
- Medium size (default 300px x 300px max)
- Large size: (default 1024px x 1024px max)
- Uploading Files: It helps you to organise your uploaded media files into month and year based folders.
I recommend you to simply make these image sizes blank. Let your WordPress Theme decides the size of your media files as per the requirement of theme itself.
Permalink Settings
After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> Click on Permalink Settings. See the screenshot below:-
Permalink settings also know as custom URL settings. This is one of the best features provided by WordPress. This facility allows you to create a custom URL structure for your post permalink/URL.
There are mainly two types of permalink settings viz. common settings and optional settings. Using common settings, you may set post URL with the followings:-
Common Settings:
- Plain: https://www.superwebtricks.com/?p=12345
- Day and name: https://www.superwebtricks.com/2024/04/26/sample-post/
- Month and name: https://www.superwebtricks.com/2024/04/sample-post/
- Numeric: https://www.superwebtricks.com/archives/123
- Post name: https://www.superwebtricks.com/sample-post/
- Custom Structure: In this setting, you may use one or combination of more than one of the following available tags:-
- %year%
- %monthnum%
- %day%
- %hour%
- %minute%
- %second%
- %post_id%
- %postname%
- %category%
- %author%
I recommend you to use simply Post Name (/%postname%) URL structure for your post permalink. Just see the address bar for the URL of this post itself. However, if you have news blog/site then Post Name and Post ID (/%postname%-%post_id%/) will be better.
https://www.superwebtricks.com/after-installing-wordpress/
Optional Setting:
WordPress allows you to enter custom structure for Category and Tag URLs of your site.
Category base: Suppose you are using the term “tutorials” as base for your category “Make Money Online” then the URL of your category will become:-
https://www.superwebtricks.com/tutorials/make-money-online/
Tag base: For example, you want to use the term “topics” as base for your tag “AdSense” then your tag URL will become:-
https://www.superwebtricks.com/topics/adsense/
Note that if you leave these optional settings blank the defaults will be used. By default the URL of category and tags are:
Default Category URL: https://www.superwebtricks.com/category/make-money-online/
Default Tag URL: https://www.superwebtricks.com/tag/adsense/
That means if you use the optional settings for your Category and Tags permalink then the word category from category URL structure and the word tag from Tag URL structure will be replaced by the word you choose.
Privacy Settings
After login to your WordPress site, go to Settings=> Click on Privacy Settings.
Privacy policy for any site is one of the mandatory task immediately after installing your WP website. As a website owner you have to comply National as well as International laws.
WordPress settings page generator. Privacy Policy Guide will help you to create your web site’s privacy policy page.
https://www.YouSiteDomain.com/wp-admin/options-privacy.php?tab=policyguide
- Create a new Privacy Policy Page: Click on Create text button to create a new page to display your site’ privacy policy.
- Change your Privacy Policy page: This option will be used if you have already created privacy policy page. Just select your created privacy policy page from the drop down.
WordPress Themes
I am using customized WP default theme. To use this customized WordPress Default Theme, you may contact us. Recommended WP themes are:-
- Astra
- Divi
- OceanWP
- GeneratePress
- Ultra
- Spencer
- Indigo
- Hellomouse
- Parallax
- Presence
- Neve
WordPress Plugins
WordPress Plugins in 2024: WP plugins are very useful and do amazing works for your site. However, you should avoid unnecessary plugins. I recommend these WP plugins for your websites:-
WP Security Plugins
The first and foremost important WP plugin is security plugins. Yes! You should use a plugin that secure your site. Security plugins helps your website to protect from attackers. Recommended WP security plugin is Wordfence Security.
WordPress Caching Plugins
To make your site fast, you may use caching plugin. Recommended WP caching plugin is WP Fastest Cache.
Progressive Web Apps Plugins
Progressive Web Apps helps your site usable by smartphones and mobile devices users in a very fast manner and gain best user experience. Recommended Progressive Web Apps plugin is PWA for WP.
Table of Contents Plugins
If you are using more than 4 headings in your post, you should use table of contents plugin for your site. It will automatically create table of contents from the page content. Recommended plugin is Easy Table of Contents.