Transcript of video
Hi. In today’s quick vid, I’m going to show you how to set up the basics of a WordPress Site.
How to set up the basics of a WordPress Site
- The first thing I do when I log in, is rearrange the dashboard screen. See screenshot below.
- Things like WordPress events and news, I don’t really want to see that.
- So, what I can do is, go up to ‘Screen Options’ in the top right corner
- Then untick what I don’t want to have displayed.
- To rearrange these (panels), I’m just going to drag them around to how I like it to be set up.
- Lastly I can close the ‘Screen Options’ tab.
Site Health Panel
- This is really handy, the ‘Site Health Panel’ status because it actually shows you what you need to do to your site to make sure that it’s secure and that it performs properly. I might have a look at that in a minute.
- See screeshot below.
Settings Panel
- The next thing I’m going to do is go down to the ‘Settings’ panel and I give my site a title. See screenshot below.
- So in this case, I will just put my business name.
- And then my ‘tagline’ – which will be my mission statement.
Site URL and WordPress URL
- The WordPress URL and the site URL – don’t touch because it will break your site. See screenshot below.
- Update your administration email address if you need to.
- Then just leave (Membership and New User Default Role) as the default.
- The site language obviously depends on what country you’re in.
- I’m going to put mine in Australia because that’s where I am.
- And then the ‘Timezone’ would be our time zone, which is in Sydney.
- And for the ‘Date Format’ we do choose this date format. See screenshot below.
- Then the ‘Time Format’ is fine (as the default).
- Click ‘Save Changes’.
Permalinks
The next important thing that you should do when you first set up a WordPress site is set your ‘Permalinks’.
- If you look under the ‘Settings’ panel, you’ll see permalinks (click on that). See screenshot below.
- Permalinks – is simply just how your URL is displayed.
- The default setting – is way too long.
- We just want a simple URL that’s easy to share and that’s user friendly.
- We’re going to click ‘Post Name’ – which will then update the custom structure.
- You can see that whatever you name your page or your post that’s what goes into the URL.
- So that’s perfect. That’s what we want.
- Lastly we click ‘Save Changes’.
Reading panel
- The next thing I would do is go to the ‘Reading’ section (under Settings).
- Then go to ‘Search engine visibility’ section. See screenshot below.
- You can tick that (if you dont want the search engines to rank your site yet)
- But you just have to make sure that you untick it when you want your site to be indexed by the search engines.
- Then click ‘Save’.
Creating a static home page
- The next thing I would do is create a homepage.
- So first of all, we need to go to ‘Pages’ (I’m just going to trash the sample page because we don’t need that).
- Then I’m going to add a new page and this will be our homepage (click create new page, add a title called ‘Home’).
- Obviously I want to publish it, so just click the ‘Publish’ button.
- And then we’re going to go back into ‘Settings’ and then ‘Reading’. See screenshot below.
- We don’t want ‘Your latest posts’ to display as our front page, we want our homepage.
- So we click – ‘A static page’.
- And then you choose your homepage (you can do your blog later).
- And then click ‘Save’.
- Lastly, I’ll go to the ‘Posts’ panel because we have a dummy post (which needs to be deleted).
- I’m just going to trash that.
- And then, just check ‘Comments’ as well (to make sure there is no spam comments).
- There’s no comments to delete.
- So, the next thing you would do if you were building a WordPress site from scratch is install a theme, which we’ll do in the next video.
So, there you have it. We’ve set up the basic settings of a new WordPress site. And now we can move on to building it.
Thanks for watching. Bye.
