I get this question quite often and it boils down to this…”I’ve installed WordPress, now what?!”

 

First off, if you’ve already taken some action, great, but in case you haven’t, the first step would be to check out my step-by-step guide on how to start a WordPress blog or website.

By following those quick and easy steps, you will be up and running with your very own website running on WordPress, in 10 minutes or less.

Once you have WordPress installed, there are a few key items that everyone should do immediately afterwards.

Be sure to listen into the Podcast Episode for a more detailed breakdown.

Some of the links below may be affiliate links. If you decide to make a purchase, I would receive a commission, at no additional cost to you. If you do make a purchase, I sincerely thank you ahead of time.

Top 10 Things To Do After Installing WordPress

1.) Remove unused plugins, themes and the default WordPress post, page and comment from your WordPress Dashboard.

Most WordPress installations come with a few pre-installed plugins like Hello Dolly, Mojo Marketplace and possibly others. I recommend uninstalling all of them for now.

To do so, click on Plugins on the left hand side and then select deactivate (if any are active) and then you will see an option for delete.

WordPress comes with several themes pre-installed, like Twenty Twelve, Twenty Fourteen and Twenty Fifteen. I recommend deleting all of them except the most recent one, which as of this post would be Twenty Fifteen.

Go to Appearance -> Themes, click each theme and then in the lower right click Delete.

WordPress also comes with some default sample content. To delete that, select Posts -> All Posts then hover your cursor over the post in the main pane and select Trash.

To delete the sample page, select Pages -> All Pages, hover your cursor over the sample page and select Trash.

There is also a sample comment, select Comments on the left hand side, hover over the comment and select Trash.

2.) Edit your Title, Tagline, Timezone and Favicon. The first three settings can be found in the WordPress dashboard under Settings -> General.

There are two ways you can upload a Favicon with most web hosts.

With WordPress 4.3 and above, there is a new way to set the Favicon.  It can be found under Appearance -> Customize -> Site Identity. The file must be at least 512×512 in size and can be any of the normal default image formats like .jpg, .gif or .png.

Most web hosts also allow you to place a 16×16 .ico file in the main directory of your website.  You can go into your cPanel, go to FileManager and upload the file to the main website directory and call it favicon.ico.  You can download free Favicons of this format here.

Once you’ve uploaded your Favicon with one of the methods above, open a private/incognito window in your browser and you should see your new Favicon in the tab of your browser when going to your site.

3.) Change permalink structure. This is a very important step, that I also mentioned in my how to start a blog guide.

A permalink is the URL for content on your website. By default, it will be very ugly and contain a post number, but none of the keywords from your title. This is terrible for SEO.

You want to change the permalink settings so that WordPress automatically takes the main keywords from your title and puts them in the URL for the post or page.

To do this, go into Settings -> Permalinks and choose the option for Post name and hit Save C...