When you’re first setting up your website – please use best practices in your WordPress settings area. Kori Ashton walks you through each screen giving you step-by-step instructions on how to address each area.
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, my name is Kori Ashton from askkori.com, and this video is here to help you today improve your WordPress settings area. Just kind of a general housekeeping. You’ll need to only do this one time, but there are certain things in there that you really need to pay attention to and address. I’ll show you best practices today for your WordPress settings.
General Settings
Alright, so of course, you’re gonna wanna log into your WordPress Dashboard, and we’re gonna go over here to the left side and go into Settings. And you can either just click on Settings or go into general, it’ll get you to the exact same screen.
And of course, first thing is address your site title. You want that to be exactly what either your blog is named, your company name is.
This little tagline right here that typically says just another WordPress site, you want to eliminate that as well, and maybe put in your tagline or your slogan or whatever that might be.
These two things next, you’ll want to be cautious to not really touch them. This could royally mess up your website if you try to make edits to these. So let’s skip over those for now, and if you’d like help with those, connect with your hosting company, they’ll be able to help you with those things.
Your email address here is gonna be your super admin email, so this, you always want this to be legit, because this will help you get access to the website if you ever needed to again.
If you are having a membership or the capabilities to log in, you might want to check this box. That’s up to you though, based on what you’re doing on your website, right? Maybe not all of these settings are applicable to what you’re up to.
If you do have any user register, what role do you want them to have? There’s all sorts of options in there. Tip, by default it’s subscriber, and that’s pretty safe to have.
What language is your website set in? It’s important that you have that setting in place.
Your timezone, you definitely want to set this, especially if you’re blogging and you’re scheduling posts, or if you want people to see the date and time that’s accurate, so set that timezone, set your date format and your time format to just however you prefer to have them displayed, and of course, what day of the week your week starts on. So, that’s some of the housekeeping there inside of General Settings.
If I went too quickly, of course, pause me, rewind me.
Writing Settings
Let’s move into the writing tab. This is really gonna be important if you’re trying to send out notifications immediately to your subscriber list, if you’re blogging and you’re allowing people to sign up. So you’ll want to address these settings. Again, this is something that your hosting company or your email provider can help you with, as you probably want to be doing some settings for your POP3 accounts, whatever that might look like.
You’ll want to have these settings set in place. If you’re not doing that or if you’re not trying to notify them dynamically, as soon as you click publish, don’t worry about this page. You can move right along to reading.
Reading Settings
So going into reading, this is really important because this is where you set your homepage, if you just wanted your website to be a static page. Now I want to say, this might change based upon what theme you’re using, because sometimes, your theme settings overwrite what we’re about to set here. So you might want to check your theme settings and be certain if this does not adjust how your website displays. But you can have your latest post be on your homepage or you can set it to just a static page.
You can also set how many posts will be in that feed, how many items. Right here, if you want the full text to be there or just a summary with that read more option to send them into your website.
And then this one is really important, you guys. You don’t want this checked if your website is live, because it will block Google, and any search engine for that matter, from following your website. So you definitely want to have that checked if you’re working in the staging environment. But be certain, go into that reading section and be certain that that box is unchecked, and click save changes.
Discussion Settings
Discussion tab, this is where, if you’re getting a lot of annoying email notifications and you just don’t want those anymore, this is the section you want to go to. Read these one by one by one.
So your default article settings, attempt to notify any blogs linked to an article. So, you’ll just want to go through each and every one of these.
Other comment settings, read each one of these. If they’re relevant to you, check the box. If they’re not, don’t worry about them, or uncheck the box.
This one here though, email me whenever anyone posts a comment. Well, I don’t really need that, ’cause I’m not allowing comments on the website. And email me whenever a comment is held for moderation. That’s if you need to approve a comment, that’s up to you again. How your blog or how your website is setup.
Before a comment appears, a comment must be manually approved. Whatever these settings are, you definitely need to come in here and adjust them.
You can add in different things here that are relevant to your website. You can add in things here that are kind of blacklisted and say no, I don’t want these words to ever appear, such as curse words, or something along those lines.
You can adjust their avatar, so their pictures. You can kind of do a rating here. It’s very interesting, and this is really more relevant to those who are running a blog and allowing comments. So you can click and save changes.
Media Settings
Your media section is cool to get in here to adjust. Again, these settings might be overwritten by what your theme is allowing you to do, but by default, you should be able to manipulate how your images are uploaded.
So you can do a default size here, width and a height and you can say to please crop them.
A medium size, a large size, and you can also say please upload my files as I upload them, please organize them in month and year-based folders, which is very, very helpful to find, especially if you’re doing this kind of in a longterm and you’re gonna have a lot and lot of images and files.
Your permalink settings are your link, a string that is created whenever you create a post or a page. You want to address these, because by default, we have what we call database language, kind of plain language living in there. And this isn’t very helpful for your users to understand what the page is, and it’s not really helpful for Google as well. So typically, what I like to do as a custom structure, I like to add in my category and my post name. But you can do any structure that you prefer, and you can also go over and really read about this.
They’ve got a link here if you’d like to go read more. It’s a very cool option there. And then privacy, if you don’t know how to setup a privacy page, what’s really cool about WordPress in some of the latest versions, it’s allowing us to kind of create our own.
So you can create a new page here that actually gives you the language for privacy policy. Now you still have to go in and sprinkle in your business name and kind of talking about exactly who you are, but it gives you a lot of the legal legs to stand on and make changes to. Then you can click publish, and you will now have a privacy policy page on your WordPress website.
Okay, I know that was a lot of information thrown at you all at once, but it’s really important that you pay attention to each and every one of those tabs and get those things setup correctly so that your blog or your website is running appropriately. I hope this helps you. I hope you’re having a great day! I’ll see you next time! Find me over at askkori.com. Bye, y’all.
