12 Essential WordPress Settings after Installation

As you’re here, probably, you’ve already completed installation of your WordPress blog in the hosting server and entered the WordPress admin dashboard. After installation, your first business is to concentrate on ‘Setting‘ option on left panel and accomplish essential set-ups.

But for the beginners, it is not an undaunted task. First reason for this is that it might not be easy for them to understand what each option means. Secondly, at the initial stage, beginners might get overwhelmed to decide how to choose an option or fill-up a field.

In this article, we’re going to clarify the most essential WordPress settings with lucid explanation that will help you in primary decision-making.

Contextually, we contributed a bunch of articles regarding Starting WordPress site till lifting it to a decent level. If you didn’t come up with those sequential WordPress blogging resources, follow these links.

Most important WordPress settings

If you aren’t logged-in, first log-in to your WordPress Dashboard by Username and Password you defined while installing WordPress. On the left panel of Dashboard screen, you see the Setting option on left. Hover the mouse over it and you see all the Setting Menu displayed with regular interfaces of the WordPress dashboard as shown below-

Now let’s enter the different setting options by following the sub-titles below.

1. Fix site Tittle and Tagline

To perform these settings, Go to Setting >> General. You see the following general setting options from the changed screen.

Give your Site Title. Here you’ll see the title that you fixed during installation of WordPress. You can change it here or keep it as it is.

Next put your tagline in Tagline field. This is a short phrase that explains what your site is about. Fix the words wisely as it actually express your site’s objectives as Tagline is displayed in Browser’s tab.

2. WordPress URL and Site address URL

Usually your WordPress URL and Site address URL are the same when you install WordPress in the root directory of your Hosting server which your Domain name points to. [Check-out details of URL here]

But in case of a large website, webmaster might want to host their WordPress files in different server. In that case, WordPress URL and site URL could be different.

However, these URLs will show up here in this Setting (see figure 2). There are also other reasons that might make you change URL of your site. You can change it from here.

Below Site address URL, there is option to put or change Administration email. This is the address for the WordPress to make communication with the admin. Set an email or change it.

3. User Registration

In Membership option, tick-out the ‘Anyone can register’ box if you need no regulation of Users’ registration. This is applicable in case of a multi-author blog where you need to give access to users in the Dashboard with definite roles to perform. If yours is the sole-author blog, leave it blank.

4. User’s default Role

If you tick-out the box ‘Anyone can register’ in the previous step, it is essential to set a default role for the registered users. There are a number of options such as Subscriber, Contributor, SEO Editor, Author, Editor, Administrator etc.

You can set any as default other than Administrator as it is reserved for you only. We suggest to set it Contributor. Each role has a definite type of access to your dashboard. If you want to give more access than Contributor to a definite user, you can change it from Users page that is linked on left panel of Dashboard.

5. Fix your Timezone

To fix your local time zone, click down arrow of Timezone option and select your own. WordPress will generate time regarding post publishing, drafting, scheduling as per your selected time frame.

Below Timezone, there are Date Format and Time Format option. Select what feels comfortable to you.

6. Set Home page and Post page

To perform this setting, go to Setting >> Reading. For “Your homepage displays“, there are two options- ‘Your latest post‘ and ‘A static page‘. By default WordPress displays your latest posts in the Home page. So the first option remains selected.

But instead of showing the latest Post-titles with thumbnails and excerpts in Home page, you can display a static page which you can structure and style as impressively as you wish. But in this fact, what about the posts-list that are displayable by default? You can show them in another page called post page. Here comes the second option.

If you choose the second option ‘A static page‘, you’ll get two other options highlighted below for selection. One is Home page and another is Post page.

To accomplish this settings, you have to build up two pages previously. One is the Static page that will be displayed as Home page (suppose that page is Home Static). Another page is where your site-posts will be displayed as feed (suppose that page is Post Display). Note, this page needs no content.

Now go back to the setting. Click select in Homepage option. You’ll find all of your posts listed. From them, select Home Static. Next click select in Post page option. From the page list, select Post Display. At last click Save and all are done.

7. Concentrate on Pingback and Trackback setting

Pingback and Trackback are two different ways of communication blog to blog through Comment.

When a blogger build a link to any of your blog posts, a notification is shown at the top of the comment listed in comment section of your dashboard saying Pingback and waits for moderation. This is called Pingback.

Trackback is also a blogging communication system but the scope and way of Trackback is different from that of Pingback.

However to get all the clarification of Pingback and Trackback and reap most out of it, follow the two links below-

In both the case, what you need to do first is enable Pingback and Trackback.

To do this, enter Setting >> Discussion. Follow the first point that says ‘Default post settings‘. From here, just tick-out the first two options- ‘Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the post‘ and ‘Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) on new posts‘.

If you don’t like Pingback and Trackback story, just leave them blank.

8. Set up comment rules

In the Setting >> Discussion page, you’ll find a bunch of options relating to controlling Comment. They are about comment moderation, whether users must be registered or logged-in before commenting or not, email notification for comment and so on. All these options are easily-understandable. Just Tick-out or leave blank.

9. Settle the Avatar setting

In our context, simply speaking, Avatar is a graphical representation or profile picture that follows all through your email or messaging communication.

To enable Avatar in Comment, go to Setting >> Discussion >>Avatars >> Avatar Display. And tick-mark the box ‘Show Avatar‘.

If Avatar is enabled, when a user comments on your blog by email, his/her Avatar will be displayed beside name if it is set previously. If any user has no custom Avatar, a built-in Avatar will be shown instead. You have a number of such pre-built Avatars in Avatars page to choose from.

10. Fix Media dimension

In Setting >> Media >> Media Setting page, you’ll find a number of options to define Image size. This includes Thumbnail size, Medium size and Large size where you can insert Maximum and Minimum value in pixel.

However this customized size in each field can be changed post-wise.

11. Fix your permalink structure

Permalink is the part of the post URL that you fix for each post. This part is set with the Home URL of a blog/site. In this Setting part, you have option how your post URL will structurally look after adding permalink with the site URL. Carefully look at figure 5 and try to choose which structure will best suit your expectation.

We recommend Post name (5th) option where your site url will be followed by a slash (/) and then the permalink. This is the structure that we follow in Netplanter. Look at the browser tab. The URL of the present post is https://www.netplanter.com/12-essential-wordpress-settings-after-installation/ which obviously supports this format.

12. Delete default post, page and comment

This section is not directly relating to Setting but bears equal importance. On installation of WordPress, you get default (sample) Post, Page and Comment which you need to delete first to create new post and page. [check-out difference between post and page here].

Perform the task by entering Post, page and Comment section clicking relevant links on left panel of WordPress Dashboard.

Hope you’ve got a glaring understanding of most essential WordPress settings. Drop a Comment if you encounter any difficulty in putting the instructions in action in your blog.