What to Do After Installing Wordpress

As you might have seen already, WordPress is a massive content management system which powers millions of websites all over the world. Yesterday I've written a list of top 10 reasons to install WordPress and the day before I put together a little manual installation guide for WordPress.

Still, what do you do if you're new to this platform? You install it and then what?

Here's a list of things to do after installing WordPress every blogger should keep in mind:

Get rid of the defaults. After the installation you will see on the home page of your blog a sample article called "Hello World!". Go to the Posts menu in your Dashboard and hover your mouse pointer over the article name. You will see an option right underneath it that says "Trash". Click on that option and the post will be removed.Using the same method you should go to the Page menu in your Dashboard and remove the sample pages that you do not need. Do the same for the sample links by accessing the Links menu.
Edit the permalink structure. After installation, the default URL of your posts will look something like http: //www.myblog.com/?p=56, where 56 is the ID of the article the link refers to. In order to make your articles friendlier for search engines you should change that structure to a more friendly one. In order to change the permalink structure access your Dashboard and go to the Settings menu and then to Permalinks. You will see the different structure types out of which I recommend using the one which includes just the post name. It keeps the URL short, easy to remember and easy to index by the search engines.
Install Akismet. Although it is not necessary in the "early life" of a blog/website, Akismet is the most praised spam filtering plug-in for WordPress. When your blog/website will reach a few hundreds/thousands visitors you will see that spammers will also start accessing your site and spam it with comments. Checking every comment for spam would be like looking for a needle in a haystack, so you might want to get Akismet ready from the start. Once you set up Akismet you can forget about it and leave it running without worrying too much about spammers.
Bookmark your administrator link. Especially if you're new to WordPress you might forget the address of your Dashboard. To avoid this, bookmark http:// yourdomain.com/wp-login.php in your browser.
Set up a name and tagline. WordPress automatically asks you for the name of the website/blog during installation, but you have to set the tagline separately afterwards. Open up your Dashboard, go to Settings -> General and set up a clear tagline for your website/blog. If you are using third-party themes (like the one I use here) you may also have options to insert an image representing the logo of your website/blog.
Set up the timezone. Chances are that you would like to schedule posts for specific days and hours of the week and having a different timezone set in the Dashboard can be confusing. You can set the correct timezone from the General - > Settings menu in your Dashboard.
Set the default post category. The default post category on a new WordPress installation is called "uncategorized". This looks very unprofessional especially if your website/blog represents a company or a business. Create appropriate categories for your posts under Posts -> Categories and then go to the Settings -> Writing menu and set your default category to a more specific one.
Create a "Contact" page. Whether your blog/website is a personal one or it represents a company, the contact page is crucial. There are some very good plug-ins that can help you create the contact page in a matter of minutes. You can find a pretty good one here.
Create an "About" page. This page is visited by everyone who doesn't know who your are so make sure you make everything clear and give all the important information about you, your services or your company.
Install a clean and friendly theme. Chances are that you won't be very attracted to the default theme WordPress sets after installation. Luckily you can change the theme from the Appearance -> Themes menu in your Dashboard. Don't forget to click on "Activate" to get the theme working.
Install Yoast SEO Plug-in.Nothing beats organic traffic coming from search engines. But to get there, you need to optimize each and every post and page of your blog/website to be search-engine friendly. I'm talking about meta tags, page and post titles, keyword placement and density, sitemaps and other such aspects. Installing Yoast's SEO plug-in make editing these settings a lot easier, because you will see all of these editable fields right below the article you are writing. This plug-in allows you to do the following things:Set a unique title and meta description for the pages
Add breadcrumbs support
Configure pages to be indexed
Create an XML sitemap of your blog/website (very important!)
Edit the robots.txt and .htaccess files
Install a backup plugin. Losing files or even the whole database behind the blog is every blogger's nightmare. Be sure to install a plug-in like WP-DB-Backup to be on the safe side in case anything bad happens.
Install the Analytics plug-in. You'll want to keep track of your visitors if you want to be able to evaluate the future success of your blog/website and the best way to do that is by using Google's Analytics system. There a quite a few plug-ins that can integrate Analytics. I recommend Google Analyticator, it's easy to set up and gets the job done easily.
Install the Broken Link Checker tool.This is a tool that examines all the links in your posts and sees if they are valid. If you have links pointing to non-existing pages, your page will be rated accordingly by the search-engines and that will results in a bad score for your website.
Start writing.

My name is Vlad Falon, I am a WordPress troubleshooter and freelance article writer born in Romania and living in Brasov. I work remotely from wherever I have a laptop and internet access.

When I am not online I must be travelling, reading or watching a good movie with a cup of hot tea next to me.

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