After completing the previous tutorial from our WordPress Tutorial for Beginners. Hopefully you are ready to change the general setting of your WordPress website.
Overview
Before you start creating you website. You will want to make a few changes to the default settings that come with your site.
- To access the settings menu click on the “settings” in the navigation menu at the left hand side of the dashboard.
WWW VS non-WWW
If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.yoursitedomainname.com) or non-www (http://yoursitedomainname.com) in your site’s URL.
Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.
General Settings
In the general page we can make changes to the most basic aspects of your WordPress site. This includes providing a site title, tagline, contact email address and the new user default role.
- In this section, you can set the Site title, the tagline and admin email. Also you set your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields to either WWW or non WWW.
- You can set the role default of a new user.
- Here you can set your preferred language and your timezone. Click “Save Changes” at the bottom of the screen.
Writing
When you are beginning you can leave all of these settings set to their default. If you would like to have a specific category that you want to be your default for all of your posts you can set it here.
Reading
The reading page allows you to choose whether you want the content on your homepage to be either displayed in rolling blog format or as a static page. The standard setting is blog format which will display the most recent post at the top of the page.
- The default setting is fine. There is a work creating the static page.
- This is up to you. The Default settings for now are fine. You can also choose how many blog posts and syndication feeds are shown. You can also choose whether you want to show the full text or a summary for your RSS feed.
- Ensure that this is not checked. If it is, checked, uncheck it and save.
Discussion
The discussion page allows you to control visitors and members permissions for leaving comments and links. You will probably want to leave the settings in their default for now but you can change these later to meet your needs as your site develops.
Media
The Media page allows you control the size of the images been uploaded and the way its organized in your folders. At the beginning you can leave all of these settings set to their default setting.
Permalinks
When you create a new blog post it is given its own webpage, the address for that webpage is known as the permalink. As you can see below there are five different settings for your permalink.
There can be some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) advantages to including the post name inside of the permalink structure and so you will probably want to set you permalink settings to reflect this by selecting post name, as your setting.
Wrapping Up
So for now, that’s it. If there is any feedback or suggestion please feedback to leave a comment below.