We have installed WordPress in our previous article. Now, we need to do some essential settings to our website to make it fast, efficient and secure. Here is the list of these essential settings which we should do after installing WordPress:
- Remove Dummy Content
- Change Site Title, Tagline and Time Zone
- Select www or non www version of website
- Configure WordPress Permalinks
- Enable/Disable User Registration
- Configure Reading Settings
- Install Nice Looking Theme
- Improve Page Load Speed
- Secure Your Website
- Media Files Settings
- Setup User Profile
- Optimize Your Images
- Configure Ping List
- Setup Google Analytics
- Install SEO Plugin
1. Remove Dummy Content
After installing WordPress you will see a dummy post (Hello World), a dummy page (Sample Page) as well as a dummy comment. It is highly recommended that you should delete this dummy content. You can easily delete this from your WordPress Dashboard. You can see below images:
(Delete WordPress dummy Hello World! post)
(Delete WordPress dummy Sample Page)
(Delete WordPress dummy Comment)
2. Change Site Title, Tagline and Time Zone
In order to change Site Title, Tagline and Time Zone we need to go to Settings >> General from your WordPress Dashboard. We have to change the Site Title and Tagline because it will appear on Google Search results.
(Change Site Title and Tagline in WordPress)
(Change Time Zone in WordPress)
3. Select www or non www version of website
You will see some websites with www prefix like www.inderbia.com, www.google.com on another side you will see some website without www prefix for example yoursite.com. You can use anyone you want but most of the big companies use www prefix with their domain name. If you will not use www prefix then it will not affect your website SEO. So it means it’s completely your personal choice that you want to use www prefix to the domain name or not. In WordPress if you want to use this prefix then you need to go to Settings >> General. Then you will see this page.
You need to add www prefix and then click on save button. Then you will be automatically logged out from WordPress and then you need to log in again. Now you will be able to see www prefix with your domain name.
4. Configure WordPress Permalinks
You need to go to Settings >> Permalinks to change permalinks structure.
Default permalinks structure is – http://yourwebsite.com/?p=123
We need to change it because it’s not friendly to search engines. So we need to change it to Post name.
5. Enable/Disable User Registration
If you will enable this option, only then users will be able to register on your website. You need to enable this option if you want to use guest blogging on your website. You can set their default role. You can see a list of roles and permissions which they will have so that you will be able to decide if you want to enable user registration or not.
Administrator – Administrator will have access to all admin features on the website.
Editor – Editor creates and manages posts. They can manage posts of another user as well.
Author – Authors can publish and manage their own posts only.
Contributor – Contributors can write and manage their own posts but they can’t publish them.
Subscriber – Subscribers can manage their profile only.
There will be a chance that you will receive spam registrations so there are some plugins available which can help get rid of this spamming issue. I have used WangGuard plugin to stop spam user registration and it works very well.
6. Configure Reading Settings
Reading settings are very important if you want to use a static page as a front page of your website or you want to increase/decrease posts per page. For reading settings you need to go to Settings >> Reading. If you want to use a static page as a front page of your website, then select A static page option and then select a page from the list of pages. If you haven’t created any page yet then you can go to pages >> Add new where you can create pages and if you want to increase/decrease the number of posts per page then you can change it from Blog pages show at most option. You just need to enter a value here. By default, it’s 10 but you can change it.
7. Install a Nice Looking Theme
It’s time to install a nice looking theme for the blog. WordPress provides many free and nice looking themes which you can use on your blog. In order to install new theme you need to go to Appearance >> Themes
You will see list of Themes which are installed. If you want to add new a theme then you need to click on the Add New option then you’ll see below this screen:
You can see that you can install a theme from this page and you can add your search keyword as well. You have some filters like Featured, Popular, Latest, Favorites and you can see upload theme options. Upload theme option allows you to upload a theme zip file from your computer.
Or if you want to purchase a nice looking theme then you can purchase from these websites.
8. Improve Page Load Speed
Page load speed is very important, if your website has slow page loading, this will stop visitors to come to your website. So, page load speed plays a very vital role to attract new visitors. In WordPress, there are many plugins available which can help to increase website page load speed.
Here is some free plugins:
- Wp Total Cache
- Wp Super Cache
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization
- Wp Lazy Load
We’ve used one premium plugin as well (Wp Rocket). It works very well to increase page load speed.
9. Secure Your Website
You need to do some settings on your website to protect your website from hackers and spammers. So, you need to do activate settings like disabe directory access, change admin panel url, Limit login attempts,and change your password.
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- Disable directory access: In order to disable directory access you need to go to .htaccess file from your hosting cpanel and add this code Options All -Indexes at the bottom.
- Change admin panel url: Changing admin panel url will protect your website from those hackers who are trying to login to your website via admin panel. There are some plugins available with which can easily change your website admin panel url. Here are some plugins: Protect Your Admin, WPS Hide Login.
- Limit login attempts: If somebody is trying to guess your website password then this plugin will be very helpful as it restricts user by limiting them with login attempts. If somebody attempts to log in multiple times, this plugin will block their ip address so that they’ll not able to access admin for next some time. You can change your password during this time.
- Change password: If you are using an easy password it’s time to changed it to a more complex one. You can change it by going to users and clicking on edit link under the username. Scroll down and there you can change your login password.
- Update themes and plugins: It is strongly recommended that you should check and update your WordPress themes and plugins regularly.
10. Media file settings
Whenever you upload an image to WordPress media library, then at that time WordPress automatically generate thumbnails of that image in different sizes. Means it will add unnecessary files to your uploads folder of your website and it will start consuming more space on the server. So if you don’t want these images to generate automatically then you need to go to Settings >> Media. Then you will see this page:
You can set these numbers to zero so that it will stop generating unnecessary image files on the server. On the other side, you can set image size according to your choice as well. Like you can see in this image you can set a default size for the thumbnail, medium and large image size as well.
11. Set up user Profile
It is very important to set up user profile because if you want to change user login password or you want to change default display name or you want to show your more details like First Name, Last Name, Nickname, Email and social media profiles then you need to click on Users tab and click on your username.
12. Optimize Your Images
Images also play a very vital role in page loading speed. If you upload large images then it will put a heavy load on the server which will affect page load speed of your website. This is what makes your site slow down and prevents visitors from viewing all the content on your site. So, it’s very important to optimize images of your website. There are some plugins like WP SMUSH and EWWW Image Optimizer available in WordPress which will help you optimize your website images very easily.
13. Configure Ping list
If you want to index your blog posts to search engines quickly then you need to use these ping services. For this you need to go to Settings >> Writing. Then you will see this page:
Copy and paste this ping list to your website:
http://rpc.twingly.com
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.feedsubmitter.com
http://blo.gs/ping.php
http://www.pingerati.net
http://www.pingmyblog.com
http://geourl.org/ping
http://ipings.com
http://www.weblogalot.com/ping
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://ping.fc2.com/
http://blogs.yandex.ru/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/
http://blogsearch.google.ae/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.be/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.bg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ca/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ch/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.cl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.cr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.hu/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.id/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.il/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ma/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.nz/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.th/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.uk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.ve/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.co.za/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ar/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.au/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.br/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.co/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.do/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.mx/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.my/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.pe/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sa/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.sg/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.tr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.uy/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com.vn/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.es/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fi/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.fr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.gr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.hr/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ie/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.it/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.jp/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.lt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.nl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pl/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.pt/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ro/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.se/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.sk/ping/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.us/ping/RPC2
http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2
http://ping.rss.drecom.jp/
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/
http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
14. Install Google Analytics
Integrating google analytics is very important for your website because with google analytics you will have all statistics of your website like how many visitors are coming to your website, how much time they are spending, what is their location, what devices they are using to explore your website, how many users currently viewing your website and you will get more stats as well. So that you will be able to create your marketing and promotion strategy accordingly. Now you can understand how google analytics plays very important role in your website. Now I will tell you steps to integrate google analytics to your website.
Step 1: Go to this url: https://www.google.co.in/analytics/
Step 2: Click on Google analytics link from this page
Step 3: You will be asked to login to your gmail account. Now you need to login to your gmail account. Then you will redirect to this page:
Step 4:
You need to fill this form and then you need to click on Get Tracking ID button. You will get a Tracking ID and you need to add this tracking id to your WordPress website. There are many best google analytics WordPress plugins available with which you can add google analytics code to your website.
These are some plugins which you can use to add google analytics code to your website:
15. Install SEO plugin
Search engines are another big source of traffic for websites. That’s why it’s very important to install SEO plugin your website so it’ll be able to drive traffic to your website from search engines. We recommend some SEO plugins which will help you to drive traffic to your website such as:
jerry
This article will show all the essential steps we need to take after installing WordPress. Very useful post Rishab sir, Thanks for this fabulous information. As I newly create my WordPress blog. Your Suggestions helps me a lot to handle various problems. Please also share vital SEO tips to promote our WordPress site or blog after installing it.
Harpreet Singh
This is very helpful information. The step-by-step guide to set your WordPress blog was clear and interesting. It helped me to improve visuals and speed and other things of the blog. Moreover, I learned how to install Goggle Analytics and SEO plugin.