First Things To Do After Installing WordPress
By Julia Khusainova • May 17, 2010 • Posted in Blogging, Tutorials, Wordpress, Wordpress plugins • No Comments »
You just installed WordPress on you new domain now what? You are expecting to see visitors coming to your website but before that you need to do a lot of work. You should know it wouldn’t be as simple as hit Publish button on your right side once a month. There are plenty of tasks every new blogger should perform to make the site be ready for web population.
Change Admin password to memorable
WordPress generates password when installing. It consists of letters, special characters and numbers and not easy to remember. You are allowed to change the password at any time going to Settings->Your Profile. Make sure it’s not as easy as “123″ or smth like this.
Create New Admin Password
Download catchy theme
There are tons of resources out there that offer free WordPress Themes and if you are not a web designer/developer and not planning to develop a theme by yourself. You can always find some cool themes for you.
Install essential plugins
Some plusins are not nessesary but without some of them you can’t even enjoy the power of WordPress in the full strength. My suggestions are:
1. Akismet – this plugin is included in the WordPress package. It catches spam comments on your blog. Very useful – do all the cleaning stuff for me.
2. SEO Platinum – powerful tool to make your WordPress blog be search-and-found by users. Optimize you blog, allow admin add keywords, description, titles, etc. to the posts.
3. Google Analytics – help you keep tracking your site statistics. You install the plugin and see how many visitors come to you site every day/week/month, where do they come from (search engines, other sites, directly), etc.
4. XML Sitemap – generate XML sitemap for your site. More about the sitemap here
5. Recent Posts – allows you to display recently published posts to attract users attantion. Recommended to be displayed somewhere on sidebar not far too down.
You can check out my post 10 Most Useful WordPress Plugins
Set up at least 5 categories
If you have recently started blogging it will help you not only fill the space of your blog but will definetely organize your ideas – just put them in the right boxes! If you are blogging about design related stuff categories could be the following:
- Photoshop Articles
- Illustrator Articles
- Brushes, Textures, Shapes
- Color Palletes
- Freebies
Configure permalinks
Permalinks are user friendly presentations of the urls on your site. Also they are seo friendly because they contain relevant keywords which you an carefully choose so that they will best fit with your content.
To configure permalinks go to Settings->Permalinks. You will see the following panel:
Configuring Permalinks
Choose the option Custom Structure and enter the rule following this syntax:
Install and Configure All in One SEO Pack or SEO Platinum Pack
These plugins as the titles suggest are for managing your SEO settings i.e. page titles, keywords, description, etc. I use SEO platinum Pack and I’m going to explain how to confugure it.
Each post you write will have the following properties:
Adding SEO Properties
Shedule automatic database backup
Download WordPress Database Backup plugin and shedule automatic backup for your WordPress database. It will help you to sleep more peicefully keeping in mind that you have all your data saved. The database backup frequency depends on how often you are blogging.  The more you blog the more often you need to save your data. If you write two posts per week then once a week database backup would be good.
Grab Google Analytics key
To use Google Analytics plugin which is essential for measuring your site stats you need to grab the key here:Â https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/?et=reset&hl=ru
Following the basic instructions you will receive a code which should be inserted in your footer.php just above the closing <body> tag.
Configure Akismet
After installing the Akismet plug-in for WordPress which allows you to catch spam comments you will need an API key to activate and use Akismet.
You can get a free API key by registering your email address below. The API key will be emailed to you after you register. Check your email and you will find the key. You must not share you key with others, it’s a kind of password for you.
After using Akismet for some time you can see the statistics and check how good you Akismet works for you.
Akismet Stats
Adjust ping services list
Ping service is the site which is notified by your WordPress site when you new post is published.
Adjusting Ping Services
To adjust the list go to Settings->Writing and add the following services to the Services list:
Create Sitemap
There is an easy way to automatically create a sitemap for your WordPress blog. Download and install XML Sitemap  for WordPress. You can shedule automatic sitemap generation for your site depending on how often the site is updated. If you are running a highly visited resource once or twice a week will be good.
Include a robot.txt file
What you should know about these file:
- robots can ignore your /robots.txt. Especially malware robots that scan the web for security vulnerabilities, and email address harvesters used by spammers will pay no attention.
- the /robots.txt file is a publicly available file. Anyone can see what sections of your server you don’t want robots to use.
Sample robots.txt for your WordPress site can look like this:
User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin Disallow: /wp-admin Disallow: /wp-includes Disallow: /wp-content Sitemap: http://www.juliakhusainova.com/sitemap.xml
Have you gone through all these steps? if not make sure you did them as they are to be the essential tips for increasing traffic to your fresh website and optimazing content as well as nessesary secure measures.
And what do you usually do when you install WordPress? Which steps you consider to be done in the first place?
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