WordPress Settings To Change After An Install

You would think that after installing WordPress it is already optimized for premium results. This couldn’t be further from the truth. So many settings in a WordPress installation are either completely off, or are set to a lesser extent than anyone would like. I’m just going to talk about some of the bigger ones that I find a bit of a pain to have to turn on everytime.

Privacy

As you can see mine is set to allow spiders to crawl my page. But by default after an install, its to block everything. Now what the hell WordPress! Why is it like this after an install? I have no idea. Seems pretty retarded since I would think the overwhelming majority want their pages crawled and indexed by Google.

So just make sure you flick this option after a WordPress install, otherwise you will be waiting for that amazing Google traffic that will never come. (P.S. If you are a keen reader of this blog, you will know I’ve already written about this particular setting before).

You can change this setting under “Settings –> Privacy”

Permalinks

This one is usually fairly obvious to most. And gets changed on pretty much every WordPress installation.

As you can see I have mine set to a custom structure of just /%postname%/. What this means is up in the URL bar, it will be www.pyrogenicmedia.com/the-post-title/. This is generally the most preferred linking structure, as it means your keywords aka your post title, is in the URL AND is closest to the root domain. If we compare to another popular structure, In the above picture “Day And Name”. This is essentially the same, only it has the date infront. Which in some cases people believe to be the fastest way to query the database. Which in a way is correct, but unless you have a huge blog it wont make much difference.

You can change this setting under “Settings –> Permalinks”

Pingbacks/Trackbacks

Although they can be a pain when you’re on the receiving end of Pingbacks. They are useful for 1. On the odd chance you will get a link back from another blog. And 2. Often webmasters see the trackback and then come to your website to take a look. Sometimes even linking back to you in a future post.

Pingbacks are basically a service to notify other blogs when you have linked to them. So say I linked to any WordPress blog in this post, when I hit submit. Pyrogenic Media will contact that blog and basically say “Hey, I talked about you here!”. The pingback then gets placed in a queue similar to the comments queue on a blog, until they are approved (If they ever are). But hey, it’s free and it doesn’t hurt to use it.

You can change this setting under “Settings –> Discussion”.

Comment Pages

Unless right from the get go you are getting 200 comments per post. There is no real need to have paginated comments. What this means is that every 50 comments or so, your blog will generate a new “Comment Page”. But even if there is less than 50, it will generate a comment page anyway (Named comment page 1). How is this an issue? Well your blog post is shown on these comment pages. Meaning for every post you do, you have a tonne of duplicate content for Google to crawl through, and really for no use at all.

You can change this setting under “Settings –> Discussion”.

Plugins

At the end of the day, you can’t just rely on stock WordPress to get the job done. You will need plenty of WordPress plugins to really start getting your blog rolling right. Here is a quick list of the one’s installed on this blog, Although there is definitely more out there that I’m still yet to find.

Dean’s Permalink Migration
If you want to change your Permalink structure, but you have already written a few posts and don’t break the URL’s. This plugin just sets up redirects from your old linking structure to your new one.

Google XML Sitemaps
Generates XML sitemaps after every post that is submitted. Works very well and fast.

Platinum SEO Pack
It’s either this one or “All In One SEO Pack”. I use this one as I found it alot more intuitive and required far less fiddling from me to get it working how I wanted it to.

SEO Slugs
Remove’s all common words like “to”, “the” and “a” from the URL title of posts. Means that there is less junk in the URL which both reduces the length of your full page URL, and also helps with SEO.

Tweetmeme
Adds a little retweet button onto every post. Really its not required, but it never ever hurts to give people the chance to spread around your article.

Sociable
Pretty much the same as above. Adds Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc onto the bottom of posts. Again on a new blog its not really needed, but it doesnt hurt.

WordTwit
This plugin will tweet out to your twitter account everytime you do a new blog post. It doesnt horde in the traffic, but getting your article out there and letting your followers know you have written another masterpiece is always good.

WP Super Cache
It’s hard to explain what exactly this does. But basically it caches pages from your blog, so that if someone views them in the future they get served that cached page. More then anything it just helps with server load as its serving a static HTML page, and not calling the database constantly. Ontop of that, it helps ever so slightly with page load speeds. Which Google is not taking into consideration as a ranking factor.

Need More?

You know there is probably a tonne more that I have left out here. WordPress is forever changing and I’m forever finding new plugins that really rock. But if I find some really amazing one’s. I will let you know