WordPress Post Install Checklist – A Step by Step Guide (Video)

WordPress Post Install Checklist

Welcome, in this video tutorial and article you will learn how to use our WordPress Post Install Checklist to ensure your WordPress installation in complete and correctly installed.

After obtaining your web hosting package and installing WordPress, there are some important steps that you need to take for security and search engine optimization (SEO). This video shows the basic WordPress Post-Install steps that I recommend.

One of the nice things about WordPress is how quick and easily you can have WordPress up and running, but, like most things, when you do it for the first time it can seem daunting so here is our post install setup checklist to make life a little easier.

For this guide I’m going to presume you have WordPress installed either locally or with your favorite hosting provider. If you need help with the installation of WordPress just follow the WordPress installation guide on our web site.

For this step by step guide I’ve created a bare WordPress site and database called wp_dbtutor.

• http://localhost/wp_dbtutor

This video shows my checklist of things that I do after every WordPress install. Changing the general settings, deleting the Admin account for security purposes, changing the Permalinks structure for better SEO, installing plugins, it is all covered here.

Logon as Administrator

Start your favourite web browser and login to WordPress as the administrator.

• http://localhost/wp_dbtutor/wp-admin

This will bring you to the Dashboard where you will see the dashboard menu.

Dashboard Menu Structure

The Dashboard

The first page to open in WordPress administration is the Dashboard which gives you a quick summary of the status of your site. The item we are most interested in at this point is the navigation menu which is located on the left side of every page within the WordPress Administration panel. If you hover your mouse over a menu, a down arrow appears on the right of the menu, which when clicked will display the submenu.

Users > Your Profile

Begin by checking your profile.

• Click the Users tab in the navigation menu
• Select the Your Profile tab. As the name suggests, this is a page for setting your general profile.

Check all sections but in particular the following:

• The details of your name are correct.
• Decide how you will be know by the public, your nickname.
• Check the contact information, i.e. the email address.
• and say a little about yourself, but remember this will be public.

There is one must do item on this page.

• Change your password to something memorable if you haven’t done so already.
• When you’re finished click the Update Profile button. If you forget to do this all your work will have been wasted. There is no reminder to save.

Settings

The last item on the navigation menu is the Settings menu item. After installing WordPress the Settings area is a priority place to visit.

• Click the Settings tab

Settings > General

• Click the General tab to go to the General Settings page.

The General Settings page is just a collection of general, public parameters.

• The Blog Title text box, as the name would suggest, is the place for your blog title which appears on the blog header and in the title bar of the web browser.
• The Tagline text box is your opportunity to enter a phrase that describes your blog. This phrase will appear below the Blog Title and will be used by search engines for indexing, so choose your words well.
• The WordPress Address (URL) text box is the location where you installed the WordPress core files. This must be the full URL path inclusive of http:// etc. The default is usually correct.
• The Blog Address (URL) text box is the web address of your blog. Typically this will be the same as the WordPress Address (URL) and is the directory where WordPress’s main index.php file is installed. Just leave the default.
• The E-Mail Address text box is the address where WordPress will send e-mail alerts such as new user registrations etc. Make sure this is a valid e-mail address.
• The Membership option box should be checked to enable anyone (unless you want a private blog) to register an account on your blog but also ensure the New User Default Role is set as Subscriber unless you have a really good reason to change it.
• For Timezone, just choose a city in the same timezone as you.
• Select your preferred date format.
• Select a Time Format
• Select a Week Start day.

When you’ve happy with your modifications,

• click the Save Changes button at the foot of the page and view the changes by clicking on the visit site link in the page header.

Settings > Writing & Reading

• Click the Writing tab menu item and have a look at the Writing page to get an overview of what it contains. These settings can be left at their defaults for the moment.
• Click the Reading tab menu item and have a look at the Reading page to get an overview of what it contains. Once again these settings can be left at their defaults though you might like to make a note that this is the place to make a Full text or Summary text choice for your blog.

Settings > Discussion

• Click the Discussion tab. This page lets you decide how you want to deal with comments.
• I favour, the administrator must always approve the comment before a comment appears, to be checked for new blogs but you can leave it to a later date if your prefer.

I suggest you accept the defaults for the rest of the page for now but consider the following:

• Consider the Comment Moderation and Blacklist sections very carefully. Consider especially, how the data you place in these areas can be misinterpreted, i.e. “press” will also match “WordPress”.
• Consider your blogs rating and default Avatar or Gravatar. A Gravator is a Globally Recognized Avatar. This is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. For more information and to register your Gravatar visit, http://en.gravatar.com.
• Click the Save Changes button if you made any.

Settings > Media

This media page just give the default for image sizes and you shouldn’t really need to change these unless you have particular requirements.

Settings > Privacy

• Unless your blog is going to be private, ensure the, I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, check box is selected.

Settings > Permalinks

By default, WordPress uses numeric dynamic web URLs which are not very user friendly and could hinder search engines so you need to change this default behaviour and create SEO friendly WordPress URLs.

Example behaviours:

• default: http://localhost/wp_test/?p=123

• modified: http://localhost/wp_test/2009/09/sample-post/

I prefer the Month and name setting and find it works well.

Read only if you have problems with Permalinks:

Permalink Note 1: Permalinks without mod_rewrite. “Pretty” permalinks require mod_rewrite:

• IIS does not support mod_rewrite.
• Apache on Windows requires mod_rewrite enabled in apache\conf\httpd.conf.

Solution:

• Try PATHINFO permalinks, put index.php/ at the start of your custom permalink structure.
• i.e.: /index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Permalink Note 2: Users of WAMP and XAMPP under Windows

• Sometimes WAMP and XAMPP does not enable mod_rewrite by default (though it is compiled in Apache). To enable mod_rewrite – and so enable WordPress to write the .htaccess file needed to create pretty permalinks – you must open apache/conf/httpd.conf and uncomment the line “LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so” (i.e., delete the hash/pound sign (#) at the front of the line).

Settings > Miscellaneous

• By default WordPress uploads files to the, wp-content/uploads, directory. If you prefer another location set the path here. I recommend you leave the default.
• With regards the, Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders, I prefer to have all my files in one folder.

Appearance > Themes

You probably only have the default theme at the moment so you have a choice of either writing your own theme (another step by step guide) or downloading one of the many free themes available.

• To download a theme, click the Add New Themes tab and either enter a few parameter in the feature filter and search box or simply click on the search button to search for everything. If you find something nice, make the selection and download the theme to your site where you can activate the chosen theme, but that’s another step by step guide. If you don’t like any of the free themes available you can try a premium theme from the likes of Elegant Themes. (who also have some very nice FREE themes available for WordPress users). See my list of top WordPress theme design solutions.

Appearance > Custom Header

The Custom Header page presents you with some very basic changes you can make to the page header. I suggest you look in the header.php file and CSS file if you need to make more elaborate changes.

Links > Edit

This page lists the hyperlinks currently on your web site.

• Select any links you want to modify or delete.
• Add links of your own

Appearance > Comments

This is the blog comment page, hovering your mouse over an item will enable the editing links.

• You will probably want to delete the current comment, in which case select the delete link.

Posts > Edit

This is the blog Post page, hovering your mouse over an item will enable the editing links.

• You will probably want to delete the current post, in which case select the delete link.

Summary Step-by-Step

1. Create blog title
2. Add email address
3. Change your password
4. Disable visual rich editor
5. Add users
6. Change the tagline
7. Edit Membership permissions
8. Set a date and time format
9. Modify Reading and Writing settings
10. Edit Discussion settings
11. Modify Permalinks structure
12. Pick a theme
13. Customize your theme
14. Write down CSS info
15. Change title format
16. Edit blogroll
17. Edit the About page
18. Add some categories
19. Edit the example post for testing
20. Install plugins
21. Check blog and test plugins
22. Create a favicon.ico
23. Create a shortcut to the Dashboard / setup WordPress client
24. Start posting

WordPress Post Install Checklist Conclusion

We are finished, our WordPress Post Install Checklist is complete. I hope you found something useful. Don’t forget to let me have your comments and remember, enjoy yourself.