Initial WordPress Setting Setup

Now that WordPress is running on our domain name, we can begin work on the site. However, before we begin building content, we will actually need to set up settings and then other software to get WordPress prepared for this site.

The first thing that I want to mention is that WordPress is intended to be a blogging content management system, but I don't use it that way. With that said, there are some default WordPress settings that I change, so I need to discuss these with you in addition to other important settings that even bloggers would need to change for their new sites.

Jetpack & Other Default WP Plugins

When you first login to your WordPress dashboard, the first thing that will likely draw your attention is a big blue banner across the top of the page for Jetpack.

This allows you to connect your blog to a WordPress.com account (where you can have a blog hosted by WordPress instead of self-hosted). However, this isn't something I'm interested in using for these sites, so I simply deactivate and delete the plugin.

To deactivate and delete the plugin, we need to go the installed plugins list in WP. Along the left-hand side of all of the administration pages, you'll see a long menu, as pictured below:

Look for Plugins in this list. If you hover over it, it will open up a submenu containing even more links.

Either click on the word Plugins in the main menu list or click on Installed Plugins in the submenu list.

I have shown the Installed Plugins page below from my site:

Even though I have just installed WordPress and haven't done anything on the site yet, there are already four plugins installed. However, I don't have any use for three of these four plugins.

Akismet is used for controlling comment spam, which is absolutely out of control on WordPress sites. However, don't be fooled, it doesn't even work good! I have actually been able to figure out that some old WordPress sites of mine got hacked using a security vulnerability in Akismet itself, even with it deactivated on the site, so be sure to delete this plugin. It has been a couple of years since that happened (at the time of this writing), but I still won't trust it and really don't have use for the plugin.

Hello Dolly is completely worthless, maybe whimsical at best. Delete it. Jetpack that I mentioned before is the third plugin that I delete - you'll first need to deactivate it before you can delete it.

Any of these plugins can always be obtained again by simply searching for them through WordPress and installing them again (it downloads directly through WordPress).

WP Super Cache is worth holding onto. It can help make your site run faster when you start to get regular traffic coming to your site. However, if you are building your site and find that updates you've made are not appearing to show up on the main site, try deactivating this plugin just until the site construction is completed. When the site is set up how you want it to look, turn it back on if you did deactivate it. If it doesn't cause you any problems though, try to leave it activated.

User Profile Settings

My next stop is to visit the User Profile. Look for Users in the left-hand admin menu. Hover over it and click on Your Profile.

Going down the left-hand side of your profile page, you can see four sections that use bold text to indicate each section of settings. I want to skip down to the second set of settings, Name, as pictured below.

Some WordPress themes will show your username on various parts of the public website. While there is nothing wrong with showing that your username is admin, it could be more useful for people to see a real name or even some type of pseudonym that you want to use for the site.

For this site, I could call myself The Down Expert. It is better for those viewing my site than showing admin and it is also relevant to my targeted niche, down comforters.

Put your public name in the Nickname field, and then select that name in the drop-down box below:

Now I want to jump to the fourth section of settings - About Yourself. Here, you can set a New Password for your account so that it is something you can remember instead of the auto-generated password that WordPress sets for you.

Be sure to type your password twice here - in the New Password and Repeat New Password text boxes.

After you are done with your changes, be sure to click the Save button at the bottom.

Default Post & Page

A fresh WordPress installation contains a default post and a default page. These are just intended to be examples for new WordPress users, so we do not need these pages. I always delete these from the site.

Look for Posts and Pages in the admin menu.

First click Posts. You'll see the default post, Hello world!. Hover your mouse over the title of the post to get links to show up below the title. Then just click on the Trash link to remove it from the live site.

It still keeps a copy in the Trash that can be restored, but this at least takes care of what we wanted to do. It can be permanently deleted from the Trash, if you want, but this isn't something that has to be done.

Repeat the same process with the Pages link. A default page, Sample Page, will be found there.

WordPress Settings

There are a number of different settings pages available in WordPress that need some attention to change some of the default settings.

All of the pages I'll be discussing for the remainder of this chapter will be found within one of the admin menus, Settings, which is all the way at the bottom of the list.

First, I want to point out the WP Super Cache link here. This was actually created and added by the WP Super Cache plugin, so the link isn't technically part of WordPress itself. This simply means that other plugins may add a settings page to this particular menu list. I will be discussing most of the other links here with you today.

General Settings

The first settings link is for General WordPress settings. I've shown the top portion of this page below:

The part that I am interested in here is the Tagline that says “Just another WordPress site”. Obviously, this is just a default setting and not something I want to use on the live site, so I want to change this to something related to my site and niche.

My recommendation here is to avoid using any of the same words in your site title (main keyword phrase) but still try to summarize what your site is about in a short sentence.

For my site, I have come up with “Helping you pick out the best bedding products for your personal needs” - not technically a sentence, but it will do. Come up with something for your site (this really isn't too important, so don't spend too much time on it). Add it to the Tagline text box and then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Reading Settings

The next step is to change a setting on the Reading page. This setting is at the very bottom of the picture below and labeled as For each article in a feed, show. The picture below shows the default setting:

Simply change that setting to Summary, and click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page. My reasons for changing this are purely precautionary - I don't want others to be able to retrieve all of my site content using a feed for this site (all WordPress sites have a feed that lists the content, which can be all of the content or just summaries of that content and a link to the full content). If someone is going to grab my content, I would prefer to use the summaries and hopefully get a backlink to my site in the process.

Discussion Settings

Next we need to go to the Discussion settings page. This page controls the WordPress commenting system, which allows your public site visitors to leaves comments.

If you remember me talking about Akismet, I mentioned that WordPress sites get a lot of spam comments. As a result, I simply disable commenting on these sites, especially since they are not blog-style websites that commonly receive visitors that leave comments.

I have shown a picture below that shows the default settings on this page:

The main thing I want to change here is the setting that disables comments - Allow people to post comments on new articles. Simply uncheck the box next to that setting.

If you already have content on the site, the existing pages will not have commenting disabled when you have only used the above setting. The sixth setting on this page, Automatically close comments on articles older than 14 days can be used to take care of those existing pages on the site. Just check the box next to that setting and change the number 14 in the text box to a 0.

I have shown these changes below:

Permalinks Settings

The last settings page that I want to talk about is the Permalinks page.

Under Common Settings on this page, I want to ensure that Post name is selected and not Default. This ensures that WordPress uses the post title as the URL address instead of referencing each page on the site with a PHP variable in the URL and a number for the value. To make a long story short, this will help with search engine rankings.

I've shown a picture below of what this setting should look like: