11 Important WordPress Settings To Do After WP Installation

Hello friends, you are here means you are all set with hosting and completed WordPress Installation. Now you must be very eager to start writing content, getting Adsense approval, and start earning, but wait.

You must do some basic yet important WordPress settings that will decide how your site functions and improve your website’s SEO score. In this article, we are going to share 11 important WordPress settings we do and that beginner must do after WordPress Installation.

11 Important WordPress Settings To Do After WP Installation

Edit Profile To Change The Display Name
Edit Profile To Add Biographical Info
Edit Profile To Change Profile Picture
Edit General Settings To Update The Site Title, Tagline, And Timezone
Discourage Search Engine Visibility
Disable Pingbacks And Trackbacks
Allow Comment And Enable Manual Approval
Set The Permalink Structure
Delete Sample Content
Delete Unused Plugins And Themes
Install the Necessary Plugins and Do the Necessary Settings

1. Edit Profile To Change The Display Name

Look at the below image and understand that your profile name is publicly seen as the author’s name below the single blog post title. It is also used for wp-login and hence it is very important to keep it secure from others.

Visitors sometimes use the author name they get from a single blog post and try a random password to get access to your site. We can easily change the display name of our profile so that the visitors can see it as the author’s name while keeping your wp-login name secured.

For this, Go to WP Dashboard > users > profile and then change the nickname with the name you want to display to the user. It will appear in the drop-down list of the next option on the same page just below the nickname that is ‘Display name publicly as’. Select the new user name from the dropdown list and click on the update profile button at the bottom of the page. That’s it. You have successfully changed the display name for the public.

You can also edit your profile by hovering over the profile icon at the right upper corner of the wp-dashboard and clicking on the edit profile option.

2. Edit Profile to add Biographical Info

In the edit profile section, you will find the sub-section ‘About Yourself‘, in which you can add or edit ‘Biographical Info‘. It is nothing but a short introduction of yours and a motive or purpose of your website. Please note that this may be shown publicly like when you add an ‘Author Box’ Below each post, it will display the Profile picture and the ‘Biographical Info’.

3. Edit Profile to Change Profile Picture

WordPress allows you to change your profile picture using ‘Gravatar’. In the edit profile section, you will find the sub-section ‘About Yourself’, in which you can change your ‘Profile Picture’.

Click on ‘You can change your profile picture on Gravatar‘. This will take you to the gravatar.com Homepage.
Scroll down and Click on ‘Claim Your Free Profile’
Enter your admin email to sign in OR if you have created another user in WordPress enter that user email to sign in. Then click on the ‘Send me a sign-in link’ button.
Check the email Inbox, and open the email received from Gravatar to confirm signup.
Click on the ‘Continue to Gravatar’ button in the above email. It will take you back to the Gravatar setup page.
Upload or Capture the Image. Adjust and Crop the image as required.
Enter your name and save the changes.
That’s it. You have successfully created your Gravatar.

4. Edit General Settings to update the Site Title, Tagline, and Timezone

In WordPress Dashboard Go to Settings > General, here you get options to edit the Site Title, Tagline, TimeZone, etc. Look in the below image to understand where in Site Title and Tagline appear. It appears in the Header and the Browser Tab.

Update the Site Title and tagline as per your niche, select TimeZone as per your location (For India it’s Kolkata), and Save Changes.

Further on the same page in the ‘WordPress Address (URL)’ and ‘Site Address (URL)’ options if you do not see ‘https‘ even though you have installed an SSL certificate for your domain then manually update it so that your URL will start with ‘https‘ and Save Changes.

wp-site-title-and-tagline — WP Site Title and Tagline

wp-general-settings — WP Site Title and Tagline

5. Discourage Search Engine Visibility

To Beginners, we recommend discouraging search engine visibility of the site to prevent indexing of the site which is yet under construction. You will find this option in WP Dashboard > Setting > Reading.

Once you complete the basic WordPress setup, Publish some blog posts, and Finish the design of your website by using the appropriate WordPress theme and customizing it as per your need, you must untick the ‘search engine visibility’ option. By unticking you are allowing Google or any other search engine crawlers to crawl and index your site (visible to the public).

Discussion Settings

In the WordPress ‘Discussion Settings’ option, there are some important options that we will see one by one.

6. Disable Pingbacks and Trackbacks

We recommend unticking this option because nowadays there are a lot of chances to receive spam comments from people who just want a backlink in your content, without any relevance. Read more to know about pingbacks and trackbacks.

Pingbacks: A pingback is a WordPress feature that automatically informs another website or blog when you link its content to your site. By linking to a different website within a WordPress post, that website’s server will get an alert that someone has linked to their content. That website might decide to show this alert as a comment on their post.

Trackbacks: A trackback is a WordPress feature to manually inform another website or blog that you linked its content in your post. This trackback will include an excerpt of your post and a link to the post where you mentioned their content. Whenever you provide a link to another website in your post you can send trackback to that website. That website’s server will get an alert of this trackback. It needs manual approval so they might decide to show this alert as a comment on their post.

7. Allow Comments and Enable Manual Approval

The second most important setting in ‘Discussion Settings’ is whether you want to allow users to comment on your posts or not.

If you want to disallow comments, you need to untick the option ‘Allow people to submit comments on new posts’.

And if you want to allow comments then just keep it tick marked but additionally tick mark the option ‘Comment must be manually approved’ to avoid spam comments. We recommend allowing comments and doing manual approval. Genuine comments show the search engine that your content is useful to people and hence improve your site visibility.

8. Set The Permalink Structure

The Permalink is one of the important parameters of a WordPress blog. it is nothing but the URL of each post. It should be short but sweet. You can change its structure by going to WP Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.

In Permalink Settings you will find different types of permalink structures however as we said above it should be short and easy to understand to users and search engines. So we recommend a ‘post name’ structure as the best option to move on.

Example Permalink will look like this – https://wpdemosite.com/hello-world/

9. Delete Sample Content

By default, WordPress generates one sample post, comment, sample page, and Privacy Policy Page Draft. Since it is not created by us we should delete it.

To Delete unwanted posts or pages in WordPress, hover the cursor over the post/page name and click on the ‘Trash‘ option, it will move your post to Trash. To permanently delete Go To Trash, hover the cursor over the post/page name and click on ‘Delete Permanently‘. That’s it, you have successfully removed the unwanted content on your site. Follow the same procedure for comments.

10. Delete unused Plugins and Themes

Plugins and Themes occupy a lot of space and increase the size of your website. So it is better to delete unused plugins and themes. It will improve your website’s page speed.

10.1. To delete any unused Plugin from WordPress, simply Deactivate it first and then Delete it. That’s it, you have successfully deleted the unused plugin.

10.2. To delete any unused Theme from WordPress, Go To WP Dashboard > Appearance > Themes. Select the theme and click on ‘Theme Detail’, you will find the delete option at the bottom. Simply click on Delete then OK. That’s it, you have successfully deleted the unused theme.

11. Install Necessary Plugins

We recommend,

Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore
LiteSpeed Cache
Rank Math SEO with AI SEO Tools
Site Kit by Google

Akismet Anti-Spam: WordPress is a very popular platform among web developers, so many people post spam comments on your site. It increases your spam score and decreases your domain and page authority which is not good from the SEO point of view of your website. To prevent this we recommend the most trusted plugin for this which is “Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection”.

UpdraftPlus: Updraft is a plugin that helps us automatically take a backup of our website at set intervals. As a beginner, we keep trying new settings or new designs on our website. In case the site crashes we can easily restore our website by using the backups taken by the updraft.

To avoid any loss of data we recommend taking a manual backup before making any major changes to your website. (Please note that does not mean you should turn off automatic backups.)

LiteSpeed Cache: It is a Free and Popular cache plugin that provides many options in one single plugin which improves your site speed and page performance. Note that, site speed and page performance are the key factors in the ranking of your website.

Rank Math: SEO Plugin makes your life easier by providing a user-friendly interface for optimizing a website with dynamically generated content. Without an SEO plugin, it is highly impossible to add SEO elements to your site and content unless your theme is built for it.

Also Read: Top 3 WordPress SEO Plugins: Boost Your Website Ranking

Below are some SEO settings you can easily do using the Rank Math SEO Plugin;

enable breadcrumb
edit robots.txt file
edit .htaccess file
setup Index and No Index options for various items like posts, pages, categories, tags, etc.
can set how your post title should appear in Google search result
auto-generate sitemap with just one click
with the inbuilt SEO analyzer tool, you can check your site’s SEO score and rectify the errors to get the best ranking, etc.

Site Kit by Google: It is the plugin by Google that helps us to connect with Google services with just a few clicks. With this, you can get connected to Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, Google Adsense, and Google Tag Manager.