Top Tips for Setting Up a New WordPress Website

From the moment your site goes online, there will be an audacious amount of malicious people trying to gain access to wreak havoc on your business reputation by turning your site into a Viagra-selling machine. The most basic first step towards security that you can take is to set a strong password.

Go to Settings – > Reading – > and make sure the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box is UNCHECKED (unless you don’t want your site to be found on search engines.)

Go to Settings – > General – > Tagline. Think of the tagline as a subtitle to your site.

Prior to organizing your navigation settings, the pages you’d like to incorporate in it must already be created, so start there. Even if you don’t already have content for those pages, go ahead and create them.

Pages -> Add New -> Name your page and click “Publish”

Once your pages are created, go to Appearance -> Menus -> Create new menu (or select an already created one to modify). From the left side you can check the boxes of the pages you’d like to add and click the “Add to Menu” button. Once the pages are added, you can simply drag and drop them in the order you’d like.

You must actually specify where you would like this menu to show up by checking the box at the very bottom of the page.

PRO TIP: The title of your page does not have to be the title used in your menu. To modify the menu label, open the item and update the “Navigation Label”.

By default, WordPress keeps every revision of your pages and posts, which over time can lead to an unnecessarily large website. To limit the number of revisions your site saves you can add a line of code to your wp-config.php file, which is located in your root/main directory of your website. (You’ll need access to your file manager or FTP access for this.)

Copy and paste this line directly above the “That’s all, stop editing!” line near the bottom.

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 3 );

Set the number to whatever you feel comfortable with.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Before you edit your wp-config.php file, be sure to make a copy of it. Adding code incorrectly to this file can break your site. Be sure you have a backup!

For every image that you upload into the media folder, WordPress automatically replicates it in multiple sizes. The number of replicates that get made depends on a variety of factors including original image size and the theme you are using. Since one image very quickly becomes multiple images it’s imperative that you appropriately size your images prior to uploading. Failing to do this will cause your website to explode in size and become difficult to manage.

A few image tips:

• Re-size images to the actual dimensions they are going to be used at
• Reduce image resolution to 72 ppi
• Use the “save for web” option in photo-editing platforms
• Install an image optimization plugin

By default the link structure in WordPress is quite unfriendly. In order to pretty up your links, navigate to Settings -> Permalinks -> Select Post name.

This changes your link structure from yoursitename.com/?p=123 to yoursitename.com/awesome-page-name

The level of customization you are able to do with your site depends largely on the theme you’ve chosen. One great place to start customizing your look is the appropriately named “Customer”. You can access the customizer in a couple of different places depending on your theme, but the generic way to find it is:

Appearance -> Customize

Additionally, look for any theme-specific customization menus your theme might have added into either the main menu on the left, or under the Appearance menu.

In website development, there is no greater loss than losing all your hard work because you didn’t create a backup of your website on a regular basis. Backups can be made manually or via a backup plugin like BackupBuddy

We highly recommend deciding on and implementing a backup solution immediately.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and don’t store all your backups on your server. When backing up your site (and we know you are because you already read the previous point, right?!?!) be sure to set up some sort of offline/cloud storage solution to keep your backups. Amazon S3 or Dropbox are great low cost (or even free) solutions for this.

While it’s ok to store a few (like 2-3) backups on your server for convenience sake, storing any more than that is potential for disaster. If your server crashes, not only have you lost your website, you’ve also lost your backups (yes, this happens!) Additionally, most web hosting companies do not appreciate customers using their resources as cloud storage.