You’ve got WordPress freshly installed into your hosting account, and you’re ready to start posting content to the site and driving traffic to your content. Before you start that, there are 4 steps that you need to take after you install WordPress for the first time in order to extend WordPress’ functionality.
These steps help you secure your website against spam comments, Add users and change the look and feel of your website. Here are the changes that you should implement as soon as you install WordPress to your hosting account:
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- Change the default usernames, if any. If your hosting provider adds a user account named “admin” or any other pre-installed user into your WordPress installation, delete those users by going to the users control panel > select the user > click on delete under the user name
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- Configure the author, reader and comments defaults. If you want people to register before they can leave a comment, or if you want people to be able to register themselves to write on your site, you can set this up by going to “Settings” > Under Membership > put a check mark in “Anyone can register” > Select a user mode for the new registrations. Be aware, that if you allow this functionality, anyone that registers on the site will be able to perform whatever function you allow them to. Be specially careful since people may be able to post spam articles to your site, if you allow them to.
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- Configure your plugins. There are 2 plugins that you really want to have, one is akismet which is anti-spam the other plugin is SEO WordPress which will help you with your search engine optimization. There are others, but these 2 should be your primary ones. Before these plugins start working, you need to activate them. To do so, go to “Plugins” then select the plugin you want to install and select “Activate” from the menu on the right. You may need to obtain a WordPress API key, follow the instructions on the screen to obtain a key if you don’t already have one.
- Configure themes. Themes control the look and feel of your blog. There are many free and paid themes to pick from. Figuring out the look and feel of your site can take a lot of time, so make sure that you dedicate some attention to how your site looks. To change themes, go under Appearance > Themes. WordPress has a depository of themes that you can search through, but you can also perform an online search for “WordPress themes” and see if you find some that you like.