Setting Up the Proper Rights After WordPress Install

While some people install WordPress website more often, there are a few who create a WP install just once or may be twice. Experienced installers may be well-versed with the entire WordPress installation process and remember everything that needs to be added or removed when setting-up a new site. But that's not the case with a beginning WordPress user. People who're new to the WP community, and installs a WordPress site less frequently may get overwhelmed to see the amount of choices available to build a website, but they may get confused about what they need to do post WP installation.

This post will throw light on some of the most essential settings that a novice should be aware of – while installing a WordPress powered site.

Make Changes to the Default WP Admin Account

By default, any WordPress website contains a username known as ‘Admin’. So, if you're using 'Admin' as your website username, chances are that hackers may easily track down the username, and then will try to uncover your password. In order to avoid this security risk, make sure to create a new username account and give administrator privileges to it.

Changing your site's username is not difficult, all you've to do is open your WP Dashboard, go to “Users” and then click on “Add New” to create a new user account. Next, log out of your WordPress site and log back in using the new username and the password (try to pick a strong and an obscure password). Also, remember to delete your old admin account but before that make sure to assign existing posts to some other user.

You can even choose to change how your name is displayed throughout the website, by making changes to the “Edit My Profile” section that comes on the upper right corner once you've logged into the WordPress admin panel.

Change the Permalinks Structure

The second thing that is very much important for you is that you should do after installing your WordPress site is to adjust the permalink settings. The URLs of your content that you publish to your WordPress site are called as permalinks. Setting up a good URL structure ensures good ranking of your site. But the WordPress default permalink structure is not user-friendly and create ugly URLs, such as, for example, www.xyz.com/?page_id=123 let's say for your 'WordPress Products' page that doesn't offer any SEO benefit. It would have been much better if your permalink structure looked something like www.xyz.com/wordpress-products – that's because it contains keyword in the URL, which is good for SEO.

And thus, it becomes essential to change the permalinks. For doing so, log into your newly installed WP dashboard, go to Settings>>Permalinks panel.

Now select any predefined permalink structure or you can even create a custom structure, and hit the “Save Changes” button to apply your changes.

Set-up Plugins

Once you've changes the permalinks, you should head towards the Plugin section to install and activate certain plugins, so as to add additional functionality to your newly installed site (a self-hosted WordPress site).

The first plugin that you should enable is Akismet. It's a built-in WP plugin that helps to eliminate spam comments. In order to activate this plugin, it's important to have an API key from Akismet, which you get from Akismet.com/get for free. Apart from Akismet, you should activate the “SEO by Yoast” plugin as it helps to make your WordPress site's page titles/descriptions search engine optimized.

Also, it is advisable to activate the W3 Cache Plugin as it helps to boost your site's load time. As you may know, website speed is crucial for its success it's very important that your blog or site loads faster.

Create the Right Categories

Categories in WordPress helps to keep your posts organized. However, by default WordPress sets the category name with “uncategorized”. But having uncategorized posts added in the site is something you should avoid, as it might send positive message to your customers and wouldn't be of any benefit. On the other hand, keeping your posts under a category with relevant name and description serve as important navigation link – to help users identify what the posts represent.

You can create a new category as your default WordPress category. For this, navigate to Settings>>Writing>>Default Post Category (highlighted in ovals in the below screen shot).

From the 'Default Post Category' click on the drop down menu over there and choose the category that you want to be your default category. Next, click on “Save Changes.” button.

Conclusion

After you've completed your WordPress installation process, making a certain tweaks and changes to your site can help optimize your website performance. Though there are a lot of settings that you need to change to get the best out of your newly installed WordPress site, but this post will help explore the most essential settings that you need to work upon.

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