WordPress Startup Tips

WordPress is a great script to use for your blog. As with any website, there are some recommended steps when setting it up. Here are a few things you might want to do in order to get your WordPress site set up so you don’t have issues later.

  1. Remove the Meta widget. We do this on our WordPress sites as it looks better without that there. The valuable space can be used for better things. You may be wondering how you’ll find the log in after. No problem! yoursite.com/login is one way to log in. Just replace “yoursite.com” with the name of your site.
  2. Turn off comments, yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-discussion.php as this is usually the area that gets filled with spam. If you want comments, perhaps make sure it is only for logged in users and have Akismet enabled. You’ll still get spam but hopefully it will be manageable. Definitely put comments to be on approval though as you don’t want a bunch of junk showing in the live area. Disabling comments won’t harm your site SEO. Having a lot of spam comments will harm SEO though and it will also fill up your database.
  3. Set your tagline. This will show in the browser tab of your site and right under the site title so you want a good tagline. yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-general.php .
  4. Make your categories, yoursite.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=category and be sure to set what you want the default category to be, yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-writing.php .
  5. While you are setting up the site, you should discourage search engines from indexing it as you might change or remove categories or pages that they have indexed. That would make a mess in your webmaster tools area for Google, Bing, etc as you’ll end up with errors for those pages. Set here, yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-reading.php the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” Then, when you are done with the set up, you can turn it back on.
  6. Permalinks. You’ll want to research about SEO and permalinks. We suggest to change the permalinks however you find best for your needs yoursite.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php . We tend to put it at Post Name.
  7. Set some default tags, yoursite.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=post_tag as this can help when you are writing posts. Tags are a good way to help people find things easier and can help in your site Search tool.

We hope you’ve found these tips helpful. If you have questions or need more tutorials, feel free to contact us.