Essential Things To Do After Installing WordPress..Immediately!

Feeling elevated after installing WordPress!

Yeass..!! That should be.

It means it’s a new start. And this is the moment when you seem highly energetic, confident and fresh as needful for any start up.

No doubt, WordPress is the best CMS (content management system) for websites. It’s free to open source CMS based on PHP and MYSQL.

Its interface is much easier than others that’s why many of newbies can easily handle their blog, using WordPress.

A lot of plugins makes our task easier. These plugins allow us to extend the feature and the functionality of blog according to our need.

There are numbers of themes for every niche. You can change your theme at any time without disturbing the contents of your website.

If you know how to set up WordPress just build a WordPress website and follow the necessary action which are very important for your blog.

But there are some necessary actions you should take immediately after installing your WordPress blog. Failing these tasks may cause some disadvantages which you can’t predict at starting.

If you have a question like after installing WordPress what do I do?

So here I am going to explain one by one, things to do after installing your WordPress website/blog at my point of view. Some items are mission critical while others are more cosmetic.

Create a WordPresss Website then Things to do after installing your WordPress

#1. Replace the default “Admin” user account, If you are using

Spammers know default username of any WordPress is ‘Admin’. It may be vulnerable. So it will be better to change your default user name.

I- For creating new user just goto Users > Your Profile

II- Now create a new user name of your choice and give it the role of an “Administrator”.

III- Now log out from your current user account ‘admin’.

IV- Log in with new user and DELETE the default user name. Make sure to choose the option to transfer your old posts to your new username when deleting the “admin” account.

>Dashboard/Users

#2. Disable User Registration

Remember, always disable the new user registration for all because it may lead security thread. If you need any user just create it at your end and share the credentials with that user.

>Dashboard/ Settings/General 

#3. Delete Unused Themes And Plugins.

Don’t forget to delete unused themes and plugins which are by default installed already in your WordPress. It will help to little executable code.

>Dashboard/Plugins/Installed Plugins
>Dashboard/Appearance/Themes

#4. Delete the Default Content

There may be chances of some dummy contents preinstalled with your WordPress for the sample or promotional purpose. There are a few pieces of dummy content installed with WordPress that you’ll want to delete.

Just check your posts, pages, comments and widgets and delete all default contents which are not related to your business.

>Dashboard/Posts

>Dashboard/pages

>Dashboard/comments

>Dashboard/Appearance/widgets

#5. Add Favicon and Touch Icons

It is a small thing, but its own impact on blogs. Web browsers and the feed readers always request favicon or apple touch icons from your server. So you can’t ignore it, you have to add these icons to avoid another 404 error.

So, create and upload favicon.ico and apple-touch.png to the home directory of your blog. Then add this line to your .htaccess to redirect all apple touch icon requests to that particular file.

RedirectMatch 301 /apple-touch-icon(.*)?.png http://xyz.com/apple-touch.png

[replace xyz.com with your url]

 

#6.Set Your Time Zone

Just choose your local time zone and date. It will help you to schedule your posts.

>Dashboard/Settings/General

#7. Setup WordPress Permalink

Regarding SEO permalink, it is quite essential to change the permalink URL to show your main keywords in the URL. Change it to Post name structure from default.

>Dashboard/Settings/Permalinks

#8. Turn off Post Revisions in WordPress

This feature is helpful to track the how many changes to post edits and can also revert to previous posts. But it may create some extra burden on your SQL files and result in the sluggish performance of your website.

So it is better to disable it, open the wp-config.php file and add the following line:

 define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);

If you want to limit the post revisions just add below line to the wp-config file:

Just in case 3 times revision is allowed to save in SQL.

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3);

#9. Disallow Indexing of WordPress scripts

There is no need to crawl and index all PHP files of WordPress installation. Just pages and posts are enough to show in search results. So we should avoid these files not to show in search results. For this, simply add below lines in the robot.txt file, which you’ll get in your public HTML folder (home directory).

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: */feed/

#10. Stop Indexing XML Files

XML Files are created by us to help search engines to crawl our site not your sitemap.

By adding the below mentioned code in to your .htaccess file in WordPress directory you can stop indexing XML sitemaps.

IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
<Files sitemap.xml>
Header set X-Robots-Tag “noindex”
</Files>
</IfModule>

#11. Remove unnecessary meta tags from WordPress header

If you check your HTML code of your WordPress blog, you will get some meta tags in your header that are useless. Like, if you check, you will get which WordPress software version you are using currently.

<meta name=”generator” content=”WordPress 4.1″ />

That is of no use. But on the other hand, it is blessing for hackers they will easily understand that what bugs are in particular version. So it is advised to always hide such type of information from your HTML file.

To do so just add below lines in your function.php file.

remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’ ) ;
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘wlwmanifest_link’ ) ;
remove_action( ‘wp_head’, ‘rsd_link’ ) ;

#12. Move out the media upload folder

By default WordPress uploads all your files and media in wp-content/uploads folder. It would be better to change this location to somewhere else. Like, you can create a subdomain ex- upload.xyz.com/files (replace xyz.com with your URL).

What are the benefits of doing this?

It has a direct impact on your loading speed of your website. It will allow parallel downloads in the browser and improves the page loading time. Which is beneficial for SERP.

Another benefit is that you can easily manage your backup files because you can secure your themes, images, videos and plugins on a different domain.

Just open your wp-config.php file and add the following lines to change the location of the wp-content folder.

define( ‘WP_CONTENT_URL’, ‘http://uploads.xyz.com/files’ );
define( ‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’, $_SERVER[‘HOME’] . ‘/uploads.xyz.com/files’ );

(replace xyz.com with your URL)

#13. Add Necessary Pages

Before starting your first post, you must have below pages on your blog.

a. About Page: 

Write an introduction and purpose of your blog/website. Like services, niche and other useful details.

b. Contact Page:

It is a very useful page regarding your business conversion. One can contact you using this page. For making this page professional, you may use Contact Form 7 plugin. You can check contact us page of this blog, I am using the same plugin.

c. Privacy Policy:

Here you can find controls to manage your information and protect your privacy and security. It is a type of legal statement.

d. Disclaimer:

In this page you can add the legal notice which covering the basic issues that arise out of the operation of a blog/website. It is a shorter version of our website terms and conditions.

You can add services page, if you are providing any type of services like SEO, web designing etc. It depends upon type of business.

#14. Important Tools

There are many awesome SEO tools that you must have.

a. Create a Sitemap:

Sitemap helps Google and other search engines to crawl and index all of your pages and posts. For this you may use Google XML sitemap plugin.

b. Google Analytics:

It provides you the tracking of all visitors. You can get it through Google analytics. Just add your site and place code on your homepages, that’s it.

c. Google Webmaster Tools, Bing :

This is very important action to take without any delay. You have to Webmaster tools will allow you to check any error, track all search traffics, keywords, device platforms and much more. You have to overview Google webmaster tools to learn it.

Here you would have to add your sitemap and robot.txt file.

d. Don’t forget to create your Social media profile:

Nowadays, it is one of the major ranking factors. So you can’t ignore it. Your blog must have social media profiles. Don’t forget to add social media followers widget and social sharing plugin on your blog.

#15. Essential Plugins

There are various WordPress plugins available on the internet. But there are some important plugins that you must use. Read below post to know all essential WordPress plugins-

BOOST! Your Blog with Ultimate List of Essential WordPress Plugins

Now it’s time to post your first SEO friendly article and keep it to continue.

Wrapping It Up

I tried my best here to share each essential things which you should follow after installation of your WordPress blog. But honestly, I know it’s not enough. There might be something important things which I forgot to share. So it’s your turn to point out those essential things which you follow before posting your first WordPress blog post.

After following above suggestions, you are almost ready to post your articles. But keep in mind that always and always try to post something unique and quality ideas. Definitely, you’ll boost your blog/website traffic in no time!

I know you read it several times on different blogs, but it’s true. And it will turn you to long term blogger.

Quality and consistency are two pillars of blogging success. So always try to fix your schedule and consistently follow that with qualitative articles.

Happy Blogging!