7 Things To Do After Installing WordPress

Oct 21, 2010 by Shivendu Madhava

After installing WordPress there are several things worth doing to get WordPress ready to go. These are just options to change in the WP-Admin system, one or two essential plugins to install and some other modifications and checks. Here’s a checklist, along with explanations of what each does:

Activate Akismet Spam Protection

Akismet is a spam filter plugin for comments. It is automatically installed with WordPress, so you simply need to go to your WP Admin Dashboard and click on Plugins, find Akismet in the list and click Activate. A message will appear asking for your WordPress.com API key, simply click the link and create a WordPress.com account and then copy and paste the key back into your Dashboard.Read Stop Comment and Trackback Spam with Akismet.

Install WP-Cache Plugin

When a page is accessed on your site, WordPress performs some database lookups and executes a bunch of code. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, however if you happen to have a lot of traffic all at once, this can slow your site right down. WP-Cache is a plugin that caches your pages periodically to dramatically reduce the load on the WordPress server.Read WP-Cache WordPress Plugin Review.

Once installed, click on Plugins in the Dashboard and click Activate. You then need to click on Options in the dashboard menu and find WP-Cache in the menu. This leads you to a page where you can enable the caching. Don’t enable just yet, because it’s best to do this after you install your theme and have everything working, otherwise you can sometimes have trouble testing changes.

Note that to get WP-Cache working you may need to create some directories for it to write to. The plugin will give you details of
what to do.

Set Permalinks

Every post you create has a permanent web address that WordPress creates called a permalink. You can select how WordPress should structure your Permalinks by clicking on Settings in the dashboard menu and then clicking on Permalinks.

There are five options to choose from:

1. Default – The default URL structure is a mix of odd characters and ID numbers
2. Day and Name – Suitable for news and time centric blogs
3. Month and Name – Suitable for news and time centric blogs
4. Numeric – An incrementing number rather than the post’s actual title.
5. Custom – By specifying a variable in %% signs you can choose the structure

A good format to use is to click on Custom and write:

/%category%/%postname%/

This will create links that have the category of the post and title of the post in the URL. These links will not only be more readable and memorable, but are also better for search engines.

WordPress uses a file called .htaccess to create the permalinks, if this is not writable by the server, WordPress will give you instructions on creating the file yourself.

Update Your Profile

Click on Users > My Profile in the WP-Admin menu and take a moment to fill out your profile. You may wish to untick ‘Use Visual Editor When Writing’ if you prefer to write in HTML as the Visual Editor has been know to mess with code, though more recent versions of WordPress are getting better in this department. This is just a preference however.

After you click Update, go back and find the select box which reads “Display Name as” and select a new option other than ‘admin’.

Make Sure File Uploads are Working

One of the neatest things about using WordPress is that when you are creating a Post you can upload files directly in WordPress and not need to ever touch your FTP program. This is great if you have multiple writers or non-tech writers, however you may need to double check that uploads are working on your server.

In WP-Admin, click on Posts > Add New to bring up the Add New Post screen then click the image icon to add assets using WordPress’ Uploader. Enter a file and try uploading. If all goes to plan the file will appear there successfully. If not, you will most likely need to create a directory for the upload facility to upload to, or set permissions for the directory to be writable. You can do this through your FTP program, the error message will tell you what folders to create.

Options for the uploads are controlled via Settings > Miscellaneous in the Dashboard.

Install Sitemap Plugin

The Sitemap plugin automatically creates an XML sitemap prepared to Google’s specification and then contacts the Google servers every time you create a new post or change the sitemap.Read Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugin Review.

Clear WordPress and Create Categories

WordPress comes with a lot of default content in the form of a sample Post, a comment, categories and a blogroll. Although these can be quite good for testing, generally speaking you will want to go through, delete them all and then create your own content.

The 7 things described above are the essential things which should be done after installing wordpres.

What People Are Looking For:

what permissions should i change after installing wordpress.