11 Things to Do After Fresh WordPress Installation

What should I do right after fresh WordPress installation? This is a question we get asked frequently by users. To launch your website, you’ll still need to do a few things after installing WordPress. The reason why we have covered 11 things to do after fresh WordPress installation, you should do as soon as you install WordPress.

1) General Settings

You should install WordPress to a freshly created website that has no content yet. In this case, the theme needs to be set up with a content area. You also need to set up one or more categories and tags.

Depending on your WordPress installation, you’ll need to edit the default settings as well. If you just want to start with the basic design of your new website, the very first step is to make sure your basic WordPress settings are as under:

1) log in to your WordPress admin panel the default URL is “yourdomain.com/wp-admin” once you are in the dashboard, navigate to Settings > General

2) Make sure you change the “Tagline” because WordPress’s default tagline is “Just another WordPress blog” which does not look professional.

3) Make sure WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL) is in this format: https://yourdomain.com

4) You can customize how WordPress displays dates in the “Date Format” section

2) Install a WordPress Theme

WordPress installs default themes that do not look professional and might not be suitable for designing custom websites.

Head over to your WordPress admin and go to Appearance > Themes

If you like any theme make sure you install the theme and uninstall all unnecessary themes which are not active.

However, we do not recommend using a free theme instead we recommend DIVI.

To seem professional, all WordPress themes require some level of customization. In most cases, this means they’ll have to change the design, create new templates, and basically recode the theme to fit your website.

At the end of the day, a free theme will almost never result in a professional-looking website.

With a premium theme, you’ll have a professional foundation on which to develop a high-quality website using WordPress’ content management system.

Why we recommend Divi WordPress theme:

The Divi WordPress theme combines great looks with tons of features to deliver a truly versatile theme. Both those looking for a ready-made solution and those who wish to create customized designs will find a great selection of page templates and an easy-to-use page builder.

• True multipurpose theme suitable for any website
• Free professional editable layout packs
• Powerful frontend & backend visual page builder
• Lots of helpful documentation & great community

3) Disable WP RSS Feeds

People are most familiar with WordPress because of its robust blogging tools. People use RSS Feeds to subscribe to fresh material that you upload as well as to feed into third-party reader programs such as Feedly.

This allows them to read your new material while on the fly. However, not everyone utilizes WordPress’s blogging functionality, and some organizations may want to block RSS feeds entirely.

The best way to disable the RSS feed is simply by installing a plugin. Go to your WordPress admin and plugins add new and search for Disable Feeds

4) Must have Plugins

Users of WordPress have access to tens of thousands of plugins. The plugins you need to install for your site will depend on the type of site you operate or the niche in which it falls.

We discuss a few essential WordPress plugins here, along with why they’re so valuable.

a) Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO has been voted the best SEO tool for WordPress. It can help you improve SEO and even analyze the readability of your content. 79% of users will only read through pages and posts on your site.

Therefore, the more easily your content is, the better your chances of keeping their attention.

There are many ways to get traffic to your website with SEO. Search engines offer more potential than any other method.

Google handles more than nine billion searches each day. It is not exaggerated to say that organic traffic can make a website or break it. In most cases, you cannot buy your way to the top.

To emphasize the point, only 5% of search engine traffic leads to paid results. Every website should have a keyword strategy.

b) Redirection

Redirection is a must-have WordPress plugin. Redirection is a WordPress redirect manager. Redirection allows you to create custom 301 redirects on your website. You can also keep track of clicks. It can also be used to track broken URLs.

Google (and all search engines) hate bad user experiences. Broken pages and 404s are a sign of the same. However, it is impossible to manually check each page or post on your website, especially if there are hundreds.

Installing the Redirection plugin will give you a list of 404 pages. All you have to do is to enter the URL to which you wish the plugin to redirect.

c) Akismet Anti-Spam

Spam is something that everyone hates, but it’s part of everyday life. Spam comments will start appearing as soon as your WordPress website is live.

Worse, many spam comments can appear genuine. Comment spam can clog up your site and ruin the user experience. If it isn’t dealt with promptly, you risk losing your readers and possibly damaging your brand.

There is a reliable and effective plugin that can take care of all this. Automattic’s official anti-spam plugin is Akismet. It is the most downloaded plugin ever, with over 35 million downloads.

It’s popular for a reason, so if you don’t use it, you should.

d) WP Super Cache

While you wait for a website to load, your cursor hovers over the back button. Slow sites can frustrate visitors, which in turn can lead to lost conversions.

The WP Super Cache plugin is required to do this. A cache is an online data store that temporarily stores data. It takes time to load a whole web page from scratch. Your browser will save files from pages that you have visited previously in its cache.

This means that it doesn’t need to get as much information from the site. This results in a quicker load time. WP Super Cache creates static pages for your site. These pages are served in place of the full PHP scripts.

This will also reduce page-serving times. Your page load times will rise significantly if you don’t cache it. WP Super Cache provides mobile caching.

e) Google Site Kit Plugin

You can connect your Google webmaster services to WordPress with the official Google Site Kit plugin. You’ll be able to view data in your WordPress dashboard where applicable, such as your statistics from Google Analytics.

Site Kit is a plugin that allows you to connect your WordPress site with these six Google services: e.g. Search Console, Analytics and AdSense, PageSpeed insights, Tag Management, Optimize.

Site Kit does not replace any of the services that we have already mentioned. Site Kit simplifies the process for integrating these services with WordPress. Site Kit, for example, can assist you in adding the tracking code to Google Analytics if you don’t have it already.

5) Select a security plug and activate it

WordPress security is like an alarm clock. It’s impossible to predict when it will happen. Every day, thousands of WordPress websites are hacked. This is a serious problem that must be addressed immediately to prevent it from becoming a grave threat.

Two main ways to protect your WordPress website are: First, choose a reliable hosting provider with a track record. A2Hosting and BlueHost are two options. A dedicated security plugin can also be used to increase your site’s security.

Wordfence and Sucuri, two of the most widely used WordPress security options, are Wordfence or Sucuri. Both offer a strong set of security features that will keep your website protected. They are both similar in many ways but they have their own unique security features.

6) Change your permalink settings

When WordPress makes a theme change or installs a plugin to add a custom post type, one of the most common ways to fix it is to update your permalinks. It can be confusing if you’re new to WordPress.

Navigate to your WordPress dashboard, then to Settings and Permalinks. Make sure you set the post name to be SEO-friendly.

7) Automate WordPress Updates

Navigate to the plugin and themes section of your WordPress admin panel. Then, activate ” Enable Auto-Updates”.

Update WordPress core

Go to Dashboard > Updates and click the “update now!” button if you see any updates. Follow the on-screen instructions to update your core WordPress.

8) Configure WordPress comments

Anyone can comment on your blog posts by default. After you approve the first comment, they will be able to comment without restriction.

You may need a different commenting policy depending on the site you are creating. You could, for example:

• To leave a comment, users must register
• After a set period, comments are automatically closed.
• You can adjust the comment rules on your site or disable comments entirely by going to Settings > Discussion.

You can set up comment moderation rules that will make your life easier, in addition to controlling who can comment.

9) Disable Directory Browsing

To change this setting, edit your WordPress “.htaccess” file. It’s not difficult, so don’t be alarmed.

This line of code should be added to your “.htaccess” file at the bottom.

Options All -Indexes

This will disable directory browsing, which is an important step to ensure the security of your WordPress blog.

10) User Registration

Decide if your blog will be multi-author or if you will be the sole author.

You should expect to receive a lot of spam registrations if you allow guest posting.

This can be done by ticking the box “Anyone can register”, and setting the “New User Default Role” to “Contributor”.

Do not tick the box that says “Anyone can register” as shown in the screenshot below.

No one else will tell you this step to do after fresh WordPress installation. However, it’s minor but crucial things to do after fresh WordPress installation for the security of your WordPress website.

11) WordPress Media Options

This is a critical thing to do after fresh WordPress installation as it directly affects your website performance.

WordPress default creates multiple sizes of every uploaded image. This is a bad practice. This will make your blog heavy and cause it to become overloaded.

To configure the correct settings, go to Settings > Media and use the screenshot below:

Conclusion

After installing WordPress, follow the above things to do after fresh WordPress installation and you will be on your way to a well-managed website.

You can turn your website into a fully functional website by following a few simple steps.

We understand each website is unique and requires different things to do after fresh WordPress installation.

What are the most important settings for WordPress? What settings would you recommend for all WordPress users? Comment below to let me know your thoughts.

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