13 Most Important Things to do After Installing WordPress

WordPress is easy to use and you need setup few things immediately after installing WordPress. Their are few major thing that your WordPress site needs to configure such as General Setting, Site Optimization for search engines, protection against attack and spams.

In this guide you will find 13 most important things to do after installing WordPress.

WordPress General Settings

General settings are the first step to setup after installing WordPress. It includes changing your website’s titles and tagline, configuring homepage and more. Follow step by step instructions below to setup your blog.

1. Change Site Titles and Tagline

Site titles and tagline is one of the most important thing that describes your brand or business. Choose short and describable titles that helps you small business website to spread quickly. You can simply go to Settings then General.

In the general settings, choose the site title, tagline in few words that describe your WordPress website. Also provide the admin email address and timezone then click on Save Changes button.

2. Configure Homepage Display

WordPress use latest post as default homepage. If you like to make custom post to appear in frontpage you can tweak the settings simply going to Settings then Reading.

You can choose the preferred hompage display selecting radio button of the latest posts or a static page.

Choosing a static page will provide you the options to select custom page that you want to display in the homepage.

Search engine visibility options allow or disallow your WordPress website to be indexed in search result. Make sure that the search engine visibility option is unchecked so that search engine can find your blog and list in the search queries.

3. Setup WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks are the URLs of the posts and pages. Setting up human readable URL structure will help your WordPress website to rank better in search engine.

Click on Settings then Permalinks.

From the common settings, choose post name which will create human readable URL for the posts and pages.

Configure WordPress SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the best way to drive huge organic traffic to your WordPress website. The tools give below help you to setup on-page SEO of your blog.

4. Install Yoast SEO

WordPress SEO become easy with the plugin. WordPress plugin is the software that allow you to add additional features to your website.

To optimizing your website in search engine we recommend you to install plugin called Yoast SEO that improve the search ranking.

5. Add Website to Google Webmaster Tools

Google webmaster tools is the bloggers favorite tool that allow you to optimize every aspect of your website. You can add your WordPress website to Google webmaster tools easily and see the traffic stats, keyword position, errors and many more.

You can easily figure it out what needs to be improve in your website and ranked better in search engine. We recommend you to refer to this tutorial to add the website to Google Webmaster Tools.

6. Add Website to Google Analytics

Successful business understand the customers necessity and behavior, what they are looking for and figure it out the ways to improve the service.

Google Analytics is the tools provided by the Google that helps you to understand your customers and increase conversion. It is the best tools to see how and where customers are interacting to your website and what they are looking for.

Again, WordPress plugins has made easy to integrate Google Analytics in your WordPress site. We recommend you to see this guide on how to installed Google Analytics in WordPress website.

Security Measures

WordPress is popular blogging platform that has dominate Content Management System (CMS) share market by more than 54%.

As being popular blogging platform, hackers attempts to take down many WordPress website everyday.

Hackers overload the web server, steal your website information and populate WordPress site with malware. Here are some of the tools that will help you to protect your WordPress blog from hackers.

7. Hardening WordPress Admin Area

The first thing you should do is to protect your WordPress site is to secure the admin area. You can see this guide to securing your WordPress admin area.

8. Activate Sucuri Protection

Another best protection is to use the Sucuri service that will stand against any types of attack to protect your blog from hackers.

You can use free Sucuri plugins which provides basic protection. It offers website firewall protection in $9.99 per month which provides service such as virtual patching & hardening, DDoS protection, CDN performance optimization, signature detection and bot blocking.

9. Prevent Comment Spamming

Comment Spam is one of the biggest issue in the website. Many website are linked to the malicious website which hurts your search engine ranking.

First things you can do to stop spamming comment is to disable hyperlinks in the comment section which will disallow your visitor to drop the links that could lead to the malicious website. We recommend you to see this guide on how to disable links or hyperlinks in WordPress comment.

As your website popularity grows you start receiving hundreds of thousands of comment and you may have to allow some good links from your loyal readers.

You may like to filter the good links and the bad links using popular WordPress plugins called Akismet. Akismet is best plugin to stop spam in your WordPress website which is provided by Automattic, company behind the WordPress and Jetpack.

10. Setup WordPress Automatic Backup

Creating WordPress backup is the only way to recover your website from crashes or hacks. Many website crashes due to the server glitch, hacks or malware as a result you will loose the business.

Many website hosting companies provides backup services but with the limited quota you may not be able to backup your WordPress site daily. We recommend you to choose the best backup plugins for your WordPress site.

You can also see this guide on how to backup and restore your WordPress website.

Customizing WordPress Site

WordPress comes with samples pages and posts which needs to trash after installing WordPress. Some of the important things to customize your WordPress site are given below.

11. Delete Default WordPress Content

After installing WordPress you will find the default post named Hello Word which is used as the placeholder. Delete it going to All posts under Posts in WordPress dashboard then click on Trash.

Similarly you will find default page named Sample Page. Delete it going to the Pages then All pages and click on Trash.

12. Upload Favicon

Favicon is the blog’s icon appears in the website title of your website.

Create an image of 512×512 or you can use this online image converter tools to convert the image to png or ico format in different sizes.

Once favicon icon is created, go to appearance then customize. Find the site Identity option and upload the favicon image in Site Icon section.

13. Create Navigation Menu

Menu makes easy to explore your website content to the visitors. You can create a navigation menu going to Menus under Appearance. Check this guide on how to create navigation menu in WordPress.

We hope this guide teaches you the most important things to do immediately after installing WordPress. You may also like to see the list of 7 best social media sharing plugins to increase traffic. If you find this guide helpful, please share and follow us on facebook and twitter.