After You Install WordPress

Posted by Bryan on September 29, 2008 under Installation and Setup | Be the First to Comment

Here are the steps we go through on every installation of WordPress after we’ve installed it, even before we start working on the actual site’s design…

Under Settings…

1. We change the site and blog url’s to include from http://yourdomain.com to http://www.yourdomain.com so that it will be more compatible with many linking and directory sites. WordPress handles redirects well either way, but we like the standard www., especially since it’s probably on your business card!

2. We change the server time to reflect the local time. For us, it’s usually -6, which means that our site’s server time will be adjusted six hours behind the Greenwich meantime or, Central Standard Time.

3. We set the first day of the week to Sunday. It’s rare to see the old post calendar in a sidebar anymore, but just in case, we like Sundays!

4. We change the permalink structure. Most of the time we go with the day and name based url’s as opposed to the ?=# structure. This is important for search engines and offers a practical and nice way to catalog content by date. There are other options, but be careful to watch out for certain file names in WordPress’ system. Always have /%something%/%postname% rather than just the postname.

5. We set up certain helpful plugins. Among the standard for us:

• WP Super Cache, which creates static html versions of your pages to speed up load time.
• WP Stats, for great stats tracking (you’ll need an account at WordPress.com with an API Key).
• The All-in-One SEO Pack, which allows you to easily change the titles of pages and posts, and also allows you to “noindex” your tag, category, and archive pages. This all helps with your search engine rankings.
• XML Google Sitemaps, which creates a sitemap for Google. Sometimes we also link to it from the frontpage, but the great advantage is that the plugin submits your site to Google upon each update.
• Akismet, which filters out spam comments, which can really be harmful on a church or ministry site.

There are others we find extremely beneficial depending on the site we’re working on and we’ll blog about those on this site, but these are the plugins we consider essential.