Things You Need to Do After Installing WordPress: So you followed the hot 45-minute installation process and you have WordPress up and running in your brand new website. But, what to do next? What do you need to do before you start creating your content and setting up your theme?
I will share the most important things that you will immediately want to do after installing WordPress, my checklist of things you should do will be on a general base perhaps it will help you even if you are already gone far and failed at some point to follow the right checklist.
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Before I continue I need you to be perfectly refresh and ready to learn. Take a glass of chilled water and relax your nerves!
10 Things You Need to Do After Installing WordPress
1. Set Up Your Site Title & Tagline:
The title and the tagline are one of the essential elements that identify your website, and tell people and search engines what your website is about.
You need to change the site title, tagline, Simply head over to Settings » General page and change these settings.
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2. Change Default Admin User:
By default, WordPress will use your username next to your blog posts and comments. You would want to replace it with your full name or nickname.
You can complete your WordPress user profile. Simply head over to Users » Your Profile page to update your profile information.
Enter a short bio of yourself. This would give your users a quick introduction and help them learn more about the author behind the articles.
3. Create a Home Page and Set Reading Settings:
Dont understimate the power of WordPress as it now powers over 26% of the web.
If you’re not using your WordPress site mainly as a blog, then you’ll probably want to create a homepage that is not your latest posts.
Go to Pages » Add New. Create a page called “Home” (or the name you wish). Now navigate to Settings » Reading. In the Front page displays section choose A static page, and then select the Home page you’ve created.
If you want, you can also set your Posts page let’s say for a new page that you can name Blog. But depending on the theme you’re using, there’s maybe another way to create a page with your blog posts, like using a specific page template.
4. Add Categories and Change the Default One:
WordPress posts are required to be filed under at least one category. By default, WordPress uses the ‘Uncategorized’ category as the default category. If you don’t change the category when writing a blog post, then it will automatically be filed under the default category.
To change the default category, first, you need to visit Posts » Categories page to create a new category. This will be used as your new default category.
If you have already in mind some of the categories your blog will have, it’s a nice idea to go and create them now so that you’ll be able to plan the editorial categories in advance, and won’t need to figure them out while writing a new post and the time to assign.
For that go to Posts » Categories and add them right there. If you want, you can write a description for each one. Some themes will display that description in the archive page, and it’s also a good thing for your SEO.
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5. Set Your Timezone, Date and Time Format:
In Settings » General you’ll find the options for Timezone, Date and Time Format.
Choose a city in the same timezone as you are or a UTC option if you don’t find your city. Now your posts’ time will be synchronized with your actual timezone and your posts scheduling will work as you expect.
Date and Time format settings control the way they’re displayed in your site. They usually appear as the metadata of your posts and tell the visitors when were the posts published or updated. You can choose one of the preformatted options or generate a format of your own.
6. Setup Backup:
All your hard work will soon be in vein, why? That is because you can never know when bad luck will come, in order to avoid losing your data. Creating backups is the only way to make sure that you can easily recover your website in case of a disaster.
Some WordPress hosting companies offer limited backup services with their hosting plans. However, these backups are not guaranteed, and it is your responsibility to backup your website on your own.
There are several great WordPress backup plugins that you can use to automatically create backups.
I recommend using Updraft Plus. It is the best WordPress backup plugin and allows you to setup automatic backup schedules. You can also store your backups securely on remote storage services like Google Drive, Amazone S3, Dropbox, and more.
7. Choose Your Discussion Settings (Comments):
Will you want anyone to be able to post a comment in your site? Will you want commenters to fill out name and email? Do you want them to be registered and logged in to comment? Do you prefer to manually approve every new comment on your site?
You’ll find all these options in Settings » Discussion. On this screen you’ll be also able to control the circumstances under which your site sends you email notifications about comments.
8. Upload Favicon and Site Icon:
Favicon or Site Icon is the tiny image that appears next to your website title in the browser. It helps your users identify your website and increases brand recognition among your most frequent visitors.
First, you will need to create an image of exactly 512×512 pixels in dimensions and save it in png, jpeg, or gif format.
After that, you need to visit Appearance » Customize and click on the ‘Site Identity’ tab. Under the ‘Site Icon’ section click on the ‘Select File’ button to upload your favicon.
9. Change Your Permalink Structure:
Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual pages and blog posts, as well as your category and tag archives.
The default structure is “Plain”, meaning that your pages and posts URLs will look something like yourdomain.com/?p=123. That’s not something you want and, for sure, that’s not something search engines like.
So let’s turn those ugly Permalinks into pretty Permalinks.
Navigate to Settings » Permalinks and select the structure that suits your site the most. If you don’t like any of the provided options, you can build a structure of your own. But make sure you include the post name for better SEO love!
10. Create a Custom menu
By default, most themes will take the existing pages on your site and place their links in the navigation area in your site. But we all know that’s not the prettiest way to build a navigation menu for your website.
The Menus screen found under Appearance » Menus enables a user to create custom navigation menus and place them in different locations over the site. Many themes come with more than one location for menus, but most of them come with at least one and that is your site’s header.
That’s it!
Your WordPress Do list is set up and ready to go! Do you have other things to do after installing WordPress? Let me know in the comment box! And Don’t forget to share!!
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Originally posted 2021-06-11 01:27:00.