Best WordPress Settings – Setting up WordPress [Video]

What will we be learning?

We’ll be looking at the best WordPress settings, to have your website on the right track for ease and usability.

Why is this important? How can I benefit from setting up my WordPress settings in the beginning?

Having your settings right is extremely important to setup in the beginning. This will allow you to provide the best user experience and prevent future problems.

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Transcript:

So one of the first things I think you should do when you have a new wordpress website is you should kind of manage the settings. I think that that’s a fairly important aspect of your website.

So the first thing, what we are going to do is we are just going to go along. We already know how to kind of use the dashboard, now we are just going to be able to kind of log in the dashboard and go into the sidebar settings.

And the first one’s going to be to be general, writing, reading, discussion and media. Permalinks, I will see if we have time in this video. If not we will just talk about it in the next video. But, the settings, very generally general settings.

Site title, what do you want your site to be called? For us we have it is wpforall adventures. Your tagline and this is generally what shows up for example at the top bar in safari, you will see the website name dash and then the tagline. So whatever you want that to be, your travel destination.

And if you use a very, if you use a simple textual based logo as in just the site title and tagline, well then the tagline should show underneath if that’s how your theme works, right. But if you actually upload a logo and we will show you how to do that in future, then will have to manually do that.

But generally, this tagline and this site title is simply just for I guess textual based, for the browser. Specific for the browser and also for search engines. What’s your address, your wordpress address, your URL? And just remember that its different www.wpforalltv.com is different from just wpforalltv.com. If we added the www, it actually would be a different website.

They are different. They are actually different, completely different domains. WordPress will direct them accordingly. But this was just, you know don’t change this simply because when you install wordpress you must have installed it on that, that’s what I told you to do.

And for me, I think this is much easier simply because nowadays a lot of people just use, utilise this when they refer to a website, they just refer to like that rather than typing out the www. And the reason why I mentioned this is generally it makes no difference. Generally people just type in the domain name by itself, nothing else.

The reason why it makes difference is in acquiring backlinks and I will talk about actually backlinks are in the future but very briefly is that if you have people refer to backlinks just to provide authority. What backlinks you have in theory means that, you know, more websites are talking about you.

Or are saying, you know. It’s a great resource and so on and so forth. But the thing is if they send a backlink to this website versus the www dot version, effectively they are different and so, effectively you are kind of drowning out or kind of I guess de concentrating the number of backlinks that you have.

So just be sure of what it is. Pretty much don’t change it, but just be sure of what is the actual website name. And you will see that right there. Email address, this is just the address used for admin purposes like a new user notification.

Membership, who can register for a new site. If you are having a membership site, obviously you would want to say anyone can register. If you are not having a membership site, well then. And you are just manually adding new users, well then you probably wouldn’t want to say, anyone can register.

But that fully depends on what type of website you are running. And what your angles are. New user default role, I would say that you should always have a subscriber role. I can’t think of a reason why you would want to do it otherwise simply because if you have these two options checked off, and all of a sudden, now you would say, you accidently leave it as administrator.

Well now anytime a new user registers, they will have access to everything. And I will talk about this one, I will actually talk about user roles. But ya, the administrator and the subscriber. The subscriber has access to practically nothing, just their own user profile.

Administrator has access to everything, so imagine anyone can register and it would be an, administrator is the default role, well now anybody who registers can edit your website. That’s not necessarily good. This is the time and date and things like that. Time format, you can change that however you please and just save the changes.

And so the next thing that we are going to be talking about is actually this writing. So when you write to it, you know, you write a new post. What are the options or what are the settings that it is going to show. And so there is not too many options. It will be fairly simple.

For example when you write something, will convert an emoticon to an actual graphical display and if you don’t use emoticons it makes no difference to you but sure, just check it off because the emoticons would look nicer in my opinion.

But also maybe your commenters use the emoticons. If you don’t necessarily use it, maybe they do. So it should automatically correct in validly nested html automatically. And so this is you know entirely up to you.

If you are not initially adding a lot of html or if you don’t necessarily want it to. Because potentially this could be very bad. Potentially if it automatically changes it but it changes it in a way that’s not necessarily what you want, that could be potentially bad simply because when you make these mistakes, in my opinion it could be hard for wordpress to identify how you necessarily want it to make.

Generally if you add something in and it’s a mistake, it just won’t show up when you test it out. It just won’t work. And so that may be a better option. So I will leave it unchecked. Default post category, when you have multiple categories, I don’t think we have actually gone through yet, how to add new categories and things like that.

Then you can make it different and it just easier for you when you add a new post, it can already pre-set to a certain category. Post format, you know, different types of post formats depending on your theme. Just leave it as standard.

Post via mail, if you want to post via email, then you will have to fill all this. I have never actually done that simply because, you know, the post I generally have need some specific formatting writing rather than just simply textual based. Ya that’s why it never was very attractive of an option for me.

One thing that is an interesting thing is this, press this option. If you ever want to, I am not entirely sure what the name of it is but I forget if it’s called annotating but for example, if you have ever seen articles where they have kind of have these quotes form another website and it says, from, according to yahoo news.

If you want to have that option of getting these little snippets from other websites, you can just use this, press this book mark. And it will make more sense if you actually put it to use, if you utilise a lot of quotes from other websites, you site sources from other websites, that could be very useful.

But if it’s all just your own content, very simple, it’s not going to be beneficial for you at all. And so the next one, it would be reading. So how will a user read your actual post or how they see it, I guess it’s better way to put it. Front page display, so you want a static page or your latest post?

And this depends on the theme that you are using. If the theme that you are using is designed to be kind of a blog, generally you are probably going to want it to be your latest post.

But if your theme is designed to be kind of that static page, for example a business website or a portfolio, it’s probably not going to be a blog as your front page. And this depends just on the theme. So if you just wanted to be a static page. And this will tell you in the documentation of your theme.

And we will show you actually how to create a static page or how to use a theme that kind of utilises both the views, your latest post or static page. But since we are probably going to be making a blog to start off with, just keep it that as your latest post.

How many blog posts to show? In your RSS feed, how many to show? And do you want to show full text in your RSS feed or summary and search engine visibility. In my opinion, you should never have this option checked off because you wouldn’t want more traffic.

Unless it’s very sensitive to the point where you don’t want the public to see it. It’s something that you just want by word of mouth. For example, something that’s a personal website. A very personal website that is only to be shared with people close to you.

You don’t want to be reading about certain things about your life then ya, they you should click that. So discussion, this is one thing that I will talk about actually when we talk about how to moderate comments. So I won’t talk too much into detail of this because there are a lot of options.

But as you can see, you know you can allow anybody to post a comment or email me whenever anyone posts a comment. Many different options there as well. So we are not going to touch those right now. \

Media, so this media option, there are a couple of different options. Well these are just the sizes. So I would not actually touch them simply because these are in my opinion good sizes, default sizes.

For example when we show you how to actually add media to your website, there is thumbnail size, there is medium size. There is large size and there is the actual size of the post. And so these, that’s where they are getting these numbers from.

So if you ever want to change them in the future, that’s where you would do it. And ya I think that for now it’s going to be good. We will talk about permalinks. I think that it will be good to talk about in a separate video.

And you will just save all these changes for your settings. And I want to mention though is that if you ever have plugins, if you ever have feature plugins, this is where you would also change the settings for them. Some of them will be down here. Some of them will be down below in their own separate menu items depending on how much setting there would be.