Are you new to WordPress? If yes, this post will be outright useful for you! Irrespective of whether you’ve installed WordPress through the auto-installer of your hosting company or you’ve done it on your own, you must be pretty excited to get started. Did you already choose a theme for your site to start adding content to your site? Like most other things in life, a little bit of preparation and planning can go a long way. In this article, we’re going through a list of most essential things that you need to do soon after installing WordPress. While some steps are crucial, some others may be cosmetic but in short, they are all necessary.
#1: Automate backups
Backups help you go through easily during the restoring process. If ever anything goes wrong with your website, you can use the backups soon to restore your website to the same position. Therefore, you can well understand that backups aren’t something which you would leave out to chance. Though some hosting companies will protect your backups, many others won’t. Hence you need to determine a single day when you will dedicate on managing backups. You might as well choose UpdraftPlus, a free plugin which can assist you.
#2: Delete all themes and plugins which lie unused
Once you have already installed your favorite theme and all the much-needed plugins, it’s always a good idea to move back to your admin’s dashboard and remove all the themes and plugins which lie there unused. There are many new WordPress users who install more than one free theme and soon realize that the premium version would be better. Just invest a few seconds to delete your WordPress installation.
#3: Install some useful and important plugins
During each and every WordPress installation, there are a number of plugins which you can undoubtedly install in order to use them for various purposes. WP-Optimize plugin, Yoast SEO plugin, Akismet plugin, Wordfence Security plugin, WordPress Job Board plugin are some of the names of the most vital ones that you may think of installing. If you’re publishing video or news, ensure using a sitemap which contains the right metadata for such mediums.
#4: Update the title of your website
One of the most crucial elements of your website is whether or not the title of the site is properly completed. Though all pages of your site should have the best title possible, the one that we mean here is the title of your site. You can find that under Setting > General. When a user finds your site through the search engine result pages that are the first site title that he sees. This also helps Google to understand what your site is about.
#5: Add a favorite icon
This is literally a very small thing which most of you may forget but you will also notice that the majority of the established sites have their own favorite icon, also known as a favicon. This is a small graphic or logo which is shown in the browser tab. This icon adds a bit of professional touch to your website and you can also use this icon in creating your list of favorites in the browser. You can design this favicon in any drawing program which you feel like using.
#6: Install a premium theme
WordPress usually comes ready with a few pre-installed themes which are all good to use. However, if you compare them to premium themes, they leave out plenty of important things. There are a number of reasons behind using a premium theme instead of a trial version. One of the main reasons is the added functionality. You can do things like setting up the homepage, using a custom favicon or logo and use shortcodes will make the entire process of starting with your site and be running it simpler and easier. Custom support is another big reason to install the premium version of a theme as you can reap benefits from the support forums.
Conclusion:
Therefore, if you’re still worried about how to get started with WordPress, follow the steps mentioned above. Don’t start your website or blog without following the points listed here as that may leave you in a mess or in a state of complication.
