Nothing beats the feeling of having a fresh WordPress website setup waiting for your eager fingertips to give it shape and content. Of course, you won’t have to do all the styling and provisioning of content on your own – there are things like WordPress themes, plugins, and content authoring services to help you out. However, unless you plan to outsource every aspect of developing your website and launching it on the road to excellence, you need to know your way around some of the WordPress basics. This includes WordPress settings and using them to configure your website.
No worries though – most of the settings you’ll find under Settings in your WordPress backend are pretty self-explanatory. Still, if you need a friend to figure it out on your own, this article will do the job pretty well. Keep it around as it will show you everything you need to know:
Site Title and Tag Line
Site title and slogan are two very important elements of your website’s identity. The site title is like the name of your website – not to be confused with the domain, though – the tagline is like a short sentence you would use to explain to someone what your website is about.
The fact that you can change the title and tagline so easily shouldn’t make you think they’re not important and deserve some time to make sure they’re the best they can be. Also note that WordPress uses your website title for identification purposes for your syndication feed.
Addresses
The Addresses section is where you need to enter the three most important addresses for your website to function properly. Your WordPress Address is the URL of the directory containing all the core WordPress files and folders for your website.
The Site Address is the URL where your domain is located and everything else people have to type into their web browser’s address bar to get to your website. It’s pretty common for the Site Address and WordPress address to be the same – they don’t happen when you want to move core files into their respective directories. If you don’t know what gesture means, you probably don’t need it either.
The last address of the three is the admin email address. This is the address where you, as the administrator, will receive all email notifications you have set up to set your own path to the website.
Setting User Roles
General Settings provides a simple checkbox that you can turn on or off whether you want the recording to be public. Just below the checkbox you can select the default user role a new user can have. The choice is between standard WordPress user roles – subscriber, contributor, author, editor, and administrator.
Language, Date and Time Settings
The remaining options in General Settings are related to site language and time. WordPress supports many different languages, so feel free to choose the one that is easiest for you and your colleagues to use. However, keep in mind that this setting only affects the dashboard.
You will then be able to choose the time zone for the website. The drop-down list contains many different cities, which can come in handy if you are not familiar with UTC zones and the associated time differences. If you know the correct offset for your time zone, you can select it from the list as well.
The time and date format is where you can change how your website displays the date and time. Note that both give you the option to set a custom format. Finally, you will also be able to choose what you consider to be the start of the week. All that’s left is the Save Changes button, which you must remember to press when you’re done with the General Settings.
Text Settings – Settings > Writing – where you can choose some of the finer nuances and writing options on your website. For example, you can set whether you want WordPress to turn emoticons into graphics here – it’s not the same as adding or disabling emojis, but it’s still pretty useful.
You will also be able to set the default post category and format. Even more interestingly, you will be able to create an e-mail address where every e-mail you receive is automatically published on your website. Finally, you can also list the websites WordPress notifies when you publish a new post.
Reading Settings, for starters, is part of your website’s settings where you can decide what appears on your site’s homepage. You’ll have a choice between a static page – in this case, separate pages to serve as the home page and posts page – and a list of the most recent posts you’ve posted on your website.
The remaining settings include the amount of content from posts and items that appear on blog pages and syndicated posts, respectively, as well as posts in posts that need to be included. Finally, you may choose to “dissuade” search engines from indexing your website, potentially significantly impacting your website’s search engine visibility.
Good or bad, comments are still one of the best ways to let your website visitors interact with your content. WordPress allows you to do tons of different things with comments – for example, if you’ve given up on trying to moderate comments, you can disable them. You can also add Facebook comments to your website if the native commenting features aren’t to your liking, or choose from numerous comment management plugins if you need help getting around them. It is possible to activate users’ subscription to comments, activate comments with images, highlight comments by authors on their posts or delete all comments. The Discussion Setting is where you do some of this.
Default Post and Other Comment Settings
The first few sets of discussion settings are those that apply to posts and comments. In the post settings, you can set feedback and trackback options, and enable or disable posting comments on new posts globally, subject to greater control on specific posts.
Comment settings include the amount of information requested from comment authors, whether and when comment sections are automatically closed, enabling nested comments, and the order in which comments are displayed.
Comment Moderation Settings
Moving on, you’ll come across settings that let you choose rules to email you in comments.also whether comments are subject to manual approval and whether authors must have previously approved comments.
A very useful setting here is the one that lets you choose a filter for comments with links, which can be great for weeding out spam comments. You’ll also be able to list trigger words that can cause the comment to automatically go to the moderation queue, as well as any trigger words that will move the comment straight to the trash.
Avatar Options
Finally, WordPress lets you set a few different options for comment avatars. First of all, you can choose whether you want avatars to appear on your website. You can choose the maximum rating for the avatar, which can come in handy if you want to have a clean, kid-friendly website. If the posted comment does not have an avatar, it can be sent with an avatar from the avatar service you specified.
The Media Settings section is where you can fine-tune the size of images used when adding them to the Media Library. You will be able to set the width and height for the thumbnail size, as well as the maximum width and height for the medium and large image sizes.
You can also decide if you want WordPress to organize your media uploads into monthly and yearly folders. If you’re struggling to find the time to organize the media library on your own, this option can do some heavy lifting for you.
How your website permalinks should be structured and what information they should contain is somewhat important, and you should consider this carefully and implement it consistently when you find the solution.
To help you out, WordPress has given you a few common permalink structure options in this section., the ability to not use any of them and create custom permalinks. There is also an option to set the category and tag base to appear on the category and basic permalinks.
Every website needs a privacy policy, right? Maybe you don’t need it, but it wouldn’t hurt to have one, even if it’s not the most pressing plugin your website needs. Especially when WordPress makes it easy to create a policy and set up a page for it. this is what you can do Settings > Privacy.
From these settings, you can either allow WordPress to create a new Privacy Policy Page for you or select an existing page to serve as that page. Then you can use WordPress’ policy guide to get an idea of what a Privacy Policy should include and create one that fits your website perfectly.
Let’s wrap it up!
When you create a website for the first time, you’ll be busy setting up everything and making sure it starts well and getting people’s attention as soon as possible. WordPress settings in the settings section of the dashboard may only cover the basics, but it is these basics that will affect how people and search engines see your website. So make sure you look at these options and settings and stay that way until you’re happy with your choices.
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