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7 Things to Do with Every New WordPress Install

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If you are a web designer or if you set up many WordPress websites, you probably already have some processes that you do with your every new WordPress installation. If not, I will explain you in this article what I do with every WordPress install that I create. In my opinion it’s really good to take care of these 7 steps, as it will make your work with that particular WordPress website easier in the future.

Most Important Things To Do After Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress is easier, but are you using it properly? Here are 7 things to do with every new WordPress install to get the maximum results.

1. Set the Permalinks

The first very important thing to do is to set your permalinks URL structure. In your WordPress admin panel go to Settings > Permalinks and I recommend you to choose the “Post name“ option. So choose this and then click the “Save Changes“ button at the bottom.

Set up permalinks 7 Things to Do with Every New WordPress Install

If you will be publishing a higher number of blog posts, you might like to include the date in your permalinks structure as well. So then they might look like e.g. http://www.yourwebsite.com/2017/03/sample-post/

2. Set the Comments

To prevent some annoying comments notifications I always set my comments in the following way. In your WordPress admin panel go to: Settings > Discussion and in the Default article settings I deselect the first 2 options (“Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article” and “Allow link notifications from other blogs on new articles”), because I don’t want to receive these kinds of notifications. Then I also tick the following settings:

  • Comment author must fill out name and email
  • Comment must be manually approved

After that, in the Comment Moderation section I always change the 2 to 1 in the “Hold a comment in the queue if it contains 2 or more links.” setting. I do this to prevent spammy comments that contain 2 or more links in them.

Discussion Settings

Lastly, in the avatar settings at the bottom I select the “Gravatar Logo” as the default avatar that will show next to the commenter’s name.

3. Delete Unused Themes

Go to Appearance > Themes and delete all themes that you won’t be using. However, don’t delete the theme that you will be using. And I also keep one other theme in reserve if anything goes wrong with my main theme, so that I have an alternative one. I usually use the WordPress-default Twenty Seventeen theme for this. So, in my case I keep the WordPress Twenty Seventeen theme and the Divi theme that I use for most of my projects. Divi is a really popular premium WordPress theme sold by Elegant Themes. It is my favorite theme. It is very flexible and you can build with it virtually anything. However, the are also many nice free themes, so you could start with a free theme and upgrade to a paid one later, when your business grows.

4. Delete Unused Plugins

In the Plugins section delete the plugins that you won’t be using. For example, I always delete both Hello Dolly and Akismet plugins, as I don’t use them. You will most likely don’t need a plugin like Hello Dolly to show you some inspirational quotes in your WordPress admin panel, as you need to concentrate on other things.

And to prevent the comments spam I use a different plugin for that – I use WP-SpamShield and am happy with its features. It blocks quite a lot of spam comments on all my WordPress blogs.

5. Delete Pages

The next step that I do is to delete the default WordPress pages, because obviously you will be creating different new pages. So just move them into trash and then go to the trash and don’t forget to empty it. You should do this if you don’t want some “sample page“ pages appear on your WordPress website.

6. Delete Posts

Now we will do the same with the default WordPress posts. Move them into trash and remove them. This is pretty simple. If you don’t do this, and you would set up a blog on your website, you could see some “Sample post“ article excerpts appearing on your blog page.

7. Change your default category

By default, the default WordPress category name is “Uncategorized“. So I would recommend renaming it to something different. For example, if you will be blogging about cars, simply rename it to “Cars“. Or if you will need more categories, simply create them. For my example it would be e.g. BMW, Audi and Honda.

Final Words

So this is the end of my WordPress to-do list. If you do some other things that I have not mentioned in this article, feel free to let me know it in the comments section below this article.

There are some other things that I do with WordPress installations as well, but usually only when setting up websites for web design clients. However, this includes installing premium, paid plugins. For example, I almost always install the Monarch plugin. It is a social sharing plugin from Elegant Themes. And I also install the Bloom plugin sometimes, too. Especially if it’s a blog. Bloom is a premium email opt-in plugin from Elegant Themes, too. You can create some nice fly-ins and popups using this plugin. However, these 2 plugins are paid and WordPress is open-source, so I have not included them in my list.

Also, it is important to always have a working backup solution of your WordPress website, especially if you put a lot of effort into it. It can save you many troubles, because if anytime anything goes wrong, you always have a backup to which you can revert. For this I use the plugin BackupBuddy. It is a premium plugin, but there are free alternatives to it as well. For example, Duplicator or Updraft.

About the author: Andrej is a freelance WordPress designer. He studied car design at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava and he now creates custom WordPress websites using the Divi theme. He also runs a blog about the Divi theme on which he shares WordPress & Divi theme tutorials and tips. Andrej likes creating WordPress websites for clients or friends. He also likes traveling and learning languages.

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Comments

  4. Hi Andrej!

    Very useful post you have shared! Yes, it is very necessary to set the permalink structure very carefully, we do the wrong here most of the times!

    By the way, great post indeed!

    Keep it up!

    Reply

  9. I am a newbie to word press and blogging i really don’t know about all these. However surely i will try to do these things to my site with your references. Thanks for telling.

    Reply

  12. Your article is very deeply giving guideline about wordpress install. i really need this type of information so thanks 😀 Very Useful and Informative Thanks for share

    Reply

  13. I would highly recommend BackupBuddy as well because of its simplicity and affordable pricing. Something valuable you may want to add to the list is a cache plug. W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache are great options.

    Reply

  14. Great list of tips for any new blogger. Setting up necessary things is very much important to secure and keep engaging your visitors on the blog. Apart from these all, there are few more things we can list over here which are required too.

    1) Optimize WordPress to speed it up. WPSuperCache, W3Total Cache and few more are popular plugins to make it happen.
    2) Change by default /wp-admin login URL to some secure URL to prevent from hacking
    3) Install popular SEO Plugin like Yoast or All in One SEO to make your blog search engine friendly.

    And there are few more things to keep in mind while setting up WordPress for the first time.

    Reply

  25. Hi Andrej, this is very useful, I have been annoyed so many times with setting up a blog for a client and then the client running out of bandwidth because of comment spammers. So I’ve made adding Google Recaptcha a part of my blog setup process to try to fight this, especially if the customer does not want to switch comments off. The bloom plugin looks good, will check it out. Thanks!
    Yasser Moosa recently posted…Choosing the Right Keywords for SEOMy Profile

    Reply

  40. Hi, Andrej
    Absolutely will put all of them to my required checklist for my next wordpress development.
    I also would like to recommend to create google analytic account for better site monitoring.
    Thank you

    Reply

  43. Very good list. I myself faced lot of issues but after reading this i understand what could I have done. Thanks for sharing!!

    Reply

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