Module 2 · 2.4

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First settings after installation

Module 2: Installing and setting up · Reading time: 8 minutes

Learning objective: After this lesson, you can correctly set up a fresh WordPress installation in half an hour, before adding content.

Key concepts: site title, tagline, site language, time zone, permalinks (post name), homepage (static or posts), search engine visibility, comments, sample content, default plugins and themes

Why do it straight away

Some settings are difficult to change later. If you change the structure of your addresses (permalinks) once your website has existed for a year, all links from outside and all search results will stop working. If you only turn off comments once you already have a thousand spam comments, you'll also have to clean those up. That's why you go through these settings before you start creating content. You'll find them all under Settings in the Dashboard.

General

Site title and tagline: the name and a short description. Search engines and browser tabs display them. Leave the tagline empty if you don't have one; a meaningless default sentence looks untidy.
WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL): both should be the address with https:// where your website is located. Don't change them without good reason: a typo will lock you out (lesson 3.1).
Administration Email Address: where notifications go. If you change it, WordPress first sends a confirmation to the new address.
Membership: turn off "Anyone can register" unless you really want visitors to create an account. If it's on, check that the default role is Subscriber. Open registration with a higher default role is a well known mistake.
Site Language: English (UK), if your website is in British English. This also determines the language of the Dashboard and the lang code in the HTML (en-GB), which search engines and screen readers use.
Time zone: choose a city, such as London or Dublin, not a fixed offset like UTC+0. With a city, WordPress automatically adjusts for daylight saving time. A wrong time zone causes scheduled posts to appear an hour too early or too late.
Date Format and Time Format: choose what your visitors are used to, for example j F Y (8 November 2026).

Permalinks: the shape of your addresses

Under Settings > Permalinks you choose what your addresses look like. The difference:

Plain:         https://example.com/?p=123
Post name:     https://example.com/opening-hours-during-christmas-week/
Day and name:  https://example.com/2026/11/08/opening-hours-during-christmas-week/

For most websites, choose Post name. The address is readable, says something about the content and doesn't change if you adjust the date. A date in the address is only useful for a news website where the date matters.

Choose this before you create content. If you change it later, all old addresses will be different. WordPress redirects some old addresses itself, but not all of them, and links from other websites and search engines will point to the old address. If you have to change it anyway, set up redirects (301) from old to new (lesson 9.2).

Saving on this page also writes the WordPress block in .htaccess (lesson 1.3). If your pages suddenly stop working after a migration (404 on everything except the homepage), it often helps to click Save here once.

Reading

Your homepage displays: your latest posts (a blog) or a static page. For most business and organisation websites, a static page is the right choice: you create a page called "Home" and possibly a page called "News" for the posts (lesson 4.2). With a block theme, you can also design the homepage in the Site Editor.
Search engine visibility: the checkbox "Discourage search engines from indexing this site". If you turn this on, WordPress adds a noindex rule to every page. Useful while building and on a test website. But this is the setting most often forgotten after launch: a website that's missing from Google for months, because this box was still ticked. Turn it off on your live website as soon as you go live. In lesson 9.2 you'll check this automatically.

Comments

Under Settings > Discussion:

Don't need comments (most business websites don't)? Then turn off "Allow people to submit comments on new posts". This only applies to new posts; you adjust existing posts individually or in bulk.
If you do want comments: require the first comment to be approved before it appears, and limit links in comments. Spam via comments is one of the biggest annoyances with WordPress.
Avatars are retrieved from Gravatar by default, a service from another company. This sends an encoded email address of the writer to that service and loads images from outside. Turn off avatars if you don't need them; that also helps your privacy story (lesson 9.3).

Cleaning up what you don't use

A fresh installation has sample content:

the post "Hello world!" with a sample comment;
a sample page;
a draft page Privacy Policy (keep this one: in lesson 9.3 you'll fill it in);
one or more default plugins (depending on your installer);
multiple default themes.

Delete the sample post and the sample page. A website with "Hello world!" at address /?p=1 reveals that nobody has looked at it. Also delete plugins you don't use (lesson 5.4).

For themes: keep your active theme and one recent default WordPress theme as a backup. If your own theme ever breaks, WordPress switches to a default theme that's still there. Remove other themes: even an inactive theme can contain a vulnerability.

In practice: what it looks like in a panel

In the WordPress Dashboard, on the left in the menu:

Settings > General: check title, tagline, addresses, membership off, language English (UK), time zone London.
Settings > Reading: choose a static homepage (if you already have that page), deliberately set the search engine checkbox.
Settings > Discussion: comments off or on approval, avatars off if you don't need them.
Settings > Permalinks: Post name, Save.
Posts and Pages: move sample content to the bin and empty the bin.
Appearance > Themes and Plugins: remove unused ones.

Summary

Go through the settings before you create content: changing permalinks and comments afterwards is difficult.
Choose Post name as the permalink structure, a city as time zone and the correct site language.
The search engine checkbox is useful while building, but must be off at launch.
Turn off registration and comments if you don't need them.
Delete sample content, unused plugins and themes; keep one default theme as a backup.

Quiz

Exercise

Exercise A2.4: Are the basics set up correctly? Enter your website's address. The program checks the homepage: the language code in the HTML (for example en-GB), whether internal links use clean permalinks (no ?p= in links to your own pages), whether the sample post at /?p=1 is gone and whether there's no noindex on the homepage. Is your website not live yet and have you deliberately switched on the search engine checkbox? Fill that in; then that line counts as orange instead of red.

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