After installing WordPress, your hands will likely be itching to get started designing your website. But before you do that, it is important to set up the WordPress general settings.
In this tutorial I will show you which general settings you need to adjust in the WordPress dashboard after a new installation.
I will explain everything step by step so you know exactly what to do!
Watch tutorial on YouTube
WordPress general settings after install
To start off, I will briefly go through the general settings in the WordPress dashboard. Go to the left navigation menu and hover over Settings and click on General.
Site title and tagline
At the top of the page you will see the fields Site Title and Tagline. You can use the fields to describe what your website is about.
For this tutorial I am going to make an example website about luxury watches. To be more specific I want to create an informative blog website with interesting information for people who love luxury watches. So for this example I adjust the Site Title to: Top 10 luxury watch brands reviews
After that I adjust the Tagline to:
Reviews to help you decide which luxury watch brands you need to add to your collection.
WordPress Address (URL) & Site Address (URL)
In the previous tutorial, I have already added the s after http in both fields to set up the SSL certificate. This provides the website with a secure connection so make sure that’s set up properly.
You can leave the Administration Email Address, Membership, New User Default Role on the default settings.
Site language
You can set a specific language for displaying the WordPress dashboard. In this case I’ll leave it at English.
After that you can also choose how the Timezone, Date Format and Time Format are displayed. In this case I will leave everything as it is and now you can click on Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
Other Settings
In the menu you can see that below the Settings option next to General there are a number of other options. I will briefly show you and also mention where to pay attention to and which settings you can leave at default.
The first option is Writing and you do not have to do anything with this and you can leave it on the default settings.
Now click on Reading in the navigation menu.
Over here you can select the homepage for the website as the static page when you are finished designing it. We will get to that later in this series so for now you don’t have to do anything yet.
You can also leave the settings for Discussion on default.
The same goes for the Media settings as you can leave everything here as it is as well.
Now go to the Permalinks and over here it is important that the Post Name option is selected. Usually this is already the case by default.
The permalinks determines how the URL of the pages is displayed in the browser. With this setting the postname is used after the domain name.
By using relevant keywords in the title of your pages and posts, these are also automatically added to the URL.
The last option in the menu is Privacy and you can leave everything at the default settings over here as well.
Updates
Another thing I want to mention before finishing up this tutorial is that you if you see a notification over here at Updates you can click on it to see what it’s all about.
Make sure that you have the latest version of WordPress installed, and if that’s not the case you can just update it by clicking the update button. The picture below doesn’t show the Update button because the latest version has already been installed, so now there is only a Re-Install Now button on the image.
At Plugins there is nothing because we haven’t downloaded any yet. I will explain everything about this in a separate tutorial.
And at the bottom of the page you will see if any updates are available for the themes. Theme updates can be ignore for now because I will delete those 4 themes anyway and install another theme later on.
So for now you don’t have to do anything with this because I will also explain everything about WordPress themes in a seperate tutorial in this series.
Now we’re already done with all the basic settings we had to check and adjust before we go over to do the pages and posts settings for the website and also install a free theme and some WordPress plugins.
Check out this tutorial to learn how to set up the site icon with the Hello Theme for WordPress.
You can watch the video tutorial on YouTube over here.
Don’t forget to like and subscribe to the YouTube channel. I would appreciate that very much!
In the next tutorial I am going to explain everything about Pages and Posts settings for your website.
It’s highly recommended to install a SSL certificate to make sure your site has a secure connection. Check out this tutorial to learn how to install a SSL certificate for your WordPress website with SiteGround.