Voosh Themes

How To Configure Wordpress After A New Install

In this post I thought it would be useful to outline the initial steps I take when configuring a new install of Wordpress. This can obviously change depending on what the purpose the site is going to serve, but there are several steps I take with every new install.

Delete The Admin Account

Deleting the default admin user account after you’ve installed Wordpress is always good to do for security reasons. This can be easily achieved through a few simple steps – initially, click on the “Users” link and create a new user account with Administrator rights. Once you’ve done this, log out and then back in again using the user account you just created. If you click on “Users” again you can then delete the default admin account. That’s it – very simple to do, but makes it a little harder for someone to hack into your account.

Permalinks

It is very important to update this setting before you start posting to your blog. Make sure that you choose a structure you’re happy with and are unlikely to want to change in the future. By default, Wordpress will give your blog posts a link like: http://www.yoursitename/?p=5 – however, this is not ideal if you’re looking to get some search engine traffic as they place quite a bit of precedence on the title of a page when deciding where to rank it. To address this, set your Permalinks to something like /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ – this will result in a different page name – for example, http://www.yoursitename/this-is-my-page-title. Google (and other search engines) much prefer this and it will help you jump up those rankings a bit and get more traffic to your site.

Comments

Getting your comments section sorted out is also useful to do when configuring a new install – there are several things you need to consider. For example, do you want to insist that your readers fill out their name and email before adding a comment, do they need to be registered and logged in to make a change, and do you want to moderate all comments before they are posted on your site? These are important questions to address and it will mostly depend on your own personal preferences and the purpose of the site you are setting up. You may also want to set up threaded comments if the theme you are using has this functionality enabled. All of these settings can be configured under “Settings -> Discussion”.

Akismet

The first plugin that you will want to activate on your new install is Akismet. This is a handy plugin that comes pre-installed with Wordpress and it does a pretty good job of blocking vast amounts of spam comments being displayed on your blog. As it’s pre-installed, all you need to do is switch it on and then enter your Wordpress API key to allow it to start doing its job. If you don’t have the API key yet, you can get it by signing up for a Wordpress account – you only need to do this once and can use the same API key for each new site that you build.

Google XML Sitemaps

Another useful plugin to install is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin – this is very useful as it automatically generates a Google sitemap of your Wordpress site which helps inform Google about all the different pages on your blog. It’s also very easy to use – you simply install and activate it, and you’re done. Manually generating and submitting a new sitemap to Google Sitemaps used to be a very boring and tedious task, but this makes the whole process so much easier!

All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack is a very nice plugin that is well worth installing and helps optimize your site for the search engines. Again, it takes very little time to setup and enables you to add a title, description, and keywords for each post that you write. Very easy and can help a lot when trying to enhance your rankings in the search engines.

Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure

The Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure is another plugin that I like to install – it essentially stops search engines from attempting to index the Wordpress pages on your site that have duplicate content on them. For example, your archive and category pages will often have duplicate content, and this can potentially harm your rankings within the search engines. It’s therefore useful to have this plugin installed and activated to help reduce the risk of this happening.

Adding a New Theme

One of the main things you’ll want to do when you have installed Wordpress is upload and activate a new Wordpress theme instead of the old blue one that is used by default. I also tend to delete the other themes that come pre-installed with Wordpress – this isn’t essential, but I just like to do it to keep everything nice and tidy.

Enabling Google Analytics

Finally, you’ll want to be able to track the amount of traffic that you are getting to your site. I use Google Analytics for this which really breaks down the traffic you receive in great detail and enables you go to get a good sense of how many visits you are receiving and where the majority of those hits are coming from. It’s therefore worth setting up a new account with Google Analytics (if you don’t have one already), add a profile to that account for your new site, and then copy and paste the code that Google provides into your site footer (just above the tag).

So, that’s it! I find these core steps for each Wordpress install gets the site off to a great start and ensures that many of the main initial issues that need addressing are sorted and out of the way. I can then focus on tweaking my theme and adding content!