Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress [With Images]

One of the most common questions that may arise in any beginners mind, ie. “What are the top 10 things to do after Installing WordPress?” So, In this post, we are going to suggest you our top 10 most essential ideas that are to be done right after installing WordPress.

Table of Contents

Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress

1. General Settings

General Settings include Site Title, Tagline, WordPress Address (URL), Site Address (URL), Email Address, Membership, User Registration option, New User Default Role, Site Language, Timezone, Date Format, Time Format, Week Starts On and add a Favicon to your Website.

To configure general settings

Go to Settings » General option on the Dashboard.

Site Title & Tagline:

These are the things that will appear in the Google search results. Default site tagline is “just another WordPress site”.

Address (URL), Site Address (URL):

The WordPress Address is where your admin pages are, along with all the other parts of WordPress, such as the folders “/wp-content/”, “/wp-includes/” live. These are the cores or brains of your WordPress site reside.

The Site Address is the public-facing part of your site. So, it is the URL that visitors visit, and the URL you put on your business card.

Email Address:

This address is used for admin purposes. Anything site related info will be sent to this email from your WordPress site.

Membership, New User Default Role & Site Language:

It depends on your website whether you are allowing users to register on your site or not. There several New user roles like Subscriber, Author, Editor, SEO Manager, Administrator, etc.

Site Language

Site language solves a common problem: your website is in your chosen language but for some reason the browser ‘thinks’ it’s in another language. This is the reason when you browse other languages and your browser gives you a notification to translate it into your native language.

Timezone, Date Format, Time Format, and Week Starts On:

In this part of “Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress” you need to set your Timezone, Time Format, and Week Starts On. For Timezone select your city and for other options go as you want.

Now add a Favicon to your Website:

We will upload another post on How to Add a Favicon in WordPress soon.

You are reading: Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress
Read Also: How To Install WordPress Manually

2. Add a Security Plugin

The most important thing is you should provide security to your site as much as possible. Although WordPress is a robust and secure framework, it can’t protect you from hackers. Poorly written plugins, themes, and weak passwords are some of the many factors that make your site prone to getting hacked. Because of this, having an extra layer of security can always be beneficial. Here are some of the best WordPress security plugins to help you protect your site: All In One WP Security & Firewall, iThemes Security, WordFence, Sucuri Security, etc.

3. Delete Default content and themes

WordPress on installation provides some default content like a Sample Page, a default (Hello World) Post with a default Comment. You should delete them before search engines crawl them. You can delete the default Page (Sample Page), default Post (Hello World) and Comment using options on the Dashboard.

Go to Dashboard » Comments to delete default comment.
Open Dashboard » Posts » All posts to delete default post.
Go to Dashboard » Posts » All posts to delete default post.

You should delete unused themes also. Most WordPress users like to install and test a few themes before deciding on one. Instead of leaving those unused themes installed, be sure to delete them.

Leaving them there can create the unnecessary routine task of updating them. And not updating them can create a security hole that will invite hackers to come inside your dashboard.

Deleting unused themes is very easy.

Go to Dashboard » Appearance » Themes

To delete a given theme, you need to hover over on theme thumbnail and select Theme Details. After that, a window will open with the option to delete the theme.

4. Change Permalink Structure

The default permalink structure is not searched engine friendly. WordPress cannot be Google friendly until you setup permalink properly.

Default permalink: http://localhost/testsite/?p=123

To make permalink search engine friendly, choose the post name which is the most common. Click Permalinks option from Settings on Dashboard. Select post name and save changes.

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5. Install SEO Plugins

Search engines are a major source of traffic for every website nowadays. SEO is an important part of any website. To ensure that your blog posts are getting maximum results, you need to optimize them using an SEO plugin. These plugins will help you to fulfill all the needs of search engines inside your contents.

Most popular of many bloggers is the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. It’s easy to use and can even generate an XML sitemap at the click of the mouse. Another very good choice is All in SEO.

Both of them have their Pro versions but the free version can also do the job properly too.

6. Install a Cache Plugin

Why you need a cache plugin? Because it will help you speed up your site and reduce the server load by serving pages from the browser cache. This is great for SEO as well as prevents your site from crashing during heavy load times.

There are several caching plugin available nowadays. Some examples,

W3 Total Cache – This the most powerful cache plugin available for WordPress users. It has lots of options for boosting your site and is a popular plugin for reducing download times via features like CDN integration. This can improve your search engine result page rankings, especially for mobile-friendly websites and sites that use SSL. If you can configure it properly then this plugin can speed up your site like a UFO.

WP Super Cache – This plugin generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an HTML file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. This is simple but powerful too. Best for beginners.

WP Fastest Cache – This plugin creates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. Setup of this plugin is so easy. You don’t need to modify the .htacces file. It will be modified automatically.

You are reading: Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress
Read Also: How To Install WordPress Manually

7. Setup Automated Backup

Before getting hacked you should set up a backup system for your site. You can do it manually using cPanel/FTP or you can use a plugin to do this. There are several free and paid Backup Plugins for WordPress, and most of them are fairly easy to use. It’s always good to back up your site and be on the safe side. So, the best way is to use Backup Plugins. To list a few free Backup Plugins BackupBuddy, WP Time Capsule, BackWPup, UpdraftPlus, and WP-DP Backup

8. Configure Antispam Plugins

Who likes spam? No-one! Spammy comments are a huge headache. Not only are they irritating, but they’re also bad for SEO too. Spam comes into your website by unwanted messages creeping in which can be controlled by using Antispam Plugins. To name a few: Akismet, Antispam Bee, GrowMap Anti-SpamBot.

9. Optimize Images

Images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a page. As a result, optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements. Because high-resolution images have a major impact on load time. They slow down page speed because of their large file size. If image size can be reduced without losing its quality, then nothing like that. Therefore optimizing images also boosts your SEO.

To solve this issue, Image Optimization plugins come to rescue. They compress images, thus optimizing them. To name a few of them: EWWW Image Optimizer, WP-Smush, Short Pixel Image Optimizer, Imagify.

Here in this post we already talked about too many plugins. Because all of them are must for WordPress. But too many plugins have a major impact on load time also. If you don’t like to install an image optimizing plugin then you can you use TinyJPG. Even google also like it and recommend it. You Check it here.

You are reading: Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress
Read Also: How To Install WordPress Manually

10. Setup Social Sharing

Without social media, life is quite impossible for peoples. Are we wrong? We don’t think so. For site traffic, social media is an easy and pure way. You can do it just by adding a plugin and you do not need to share anything manually. Because the plugin will do it for you.

There are hundreds of social sharing plugin available in the WordPress plugin store. We recommend going with JetPack. More then social sharing it provides lots of services like data loss, downtime notification, Site stats and analytics, Lazy image loading and stop brute force hacking and lots more.

Wrapping It Up

All the Steps mentioned above are essential for any WordPress site. We can not refuse that there are other important plugins too these ones should be at the top of the list.

In conclusion, We hope all the tips of this article are helpful for you. Let us know in the comments below if you find any difficulty to configure any settings.

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