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5 Things You Need to Do Immediately After You Install WordPress 5

So you decided to start a blog or an entire website. WordPress comes as a universal solution for such projects. It’s easy to use even without programming skills. That doesn’t mean you can launch a WordPress site in minutes and make it perfect if you don’t know anything about the platform.

There are too many different functions, settings, plugins, and themes. If this is your first time facing all these opportunities, you’ll be confused.

First, you choose a hosting provider and you install WordPress 5 through it. That was easy. Now what?

1. Personalize Sensitive Data

With WordPress, you get a default username: Admin. For security purposes, you should definitely change it. Many webmasters stick with it since it’s convenient. But Adminas a username makes it easier for hackers to log into your website. This is the process:

• Go to Users, and find Add New.

• You’ll see a brief form that requires your new username, as well as your name, email, website, and password.

• Click the Add New Userbutton

You’re done.

To personalize the site even further, you can change the display name and the nickname, too. The display is the name your visitors will see when you present yourself as the author of a post or comments. The nickname is something you want your readers to call you.

2. Personalize the Website Details

WordPress is a highly flexible platform, which allows you to control all aspects of your site. The first thing you might want to do is change the website’s title. It may be different from the web address you used at the initial steps of the process, but it should still be related to your brand’s name.

• Go to General Optionunder Settings

• In this section of the settings, you can change the website’s title. You can also alter the timezone and tagline.

We always recommend adding a relevant tagline. It’s the brief description of your site, and it serves as an introduction to your content. It’s practically the motto of your website. As for the timezone, it’s important for scheduling posts to be published at the right time.

3. Automate the Back up Process

What if something goes wrong and you lose all the content you worked so hard for?

That would be detrimental for your site, so you’ll surely do backups on a regular basis. Did you know you could automate that process?

Your hosting company might cover the backups for you, but that usually doesn’t happen with a shared hosting plan. So you need a plugin that automates the backups for you. VaultPress and BackupBuddy are among the most effective plugins of that type. They will back up your data and restore it when necessary.

4. Get Your Premium Theme

A free WordPress theme is an option when you want a blog that would boost your chances to get an interview for a job. A potential employer would only look at the content and wouldn’t bother much about design… unless you’re applying for a position in design or programming.

But is a free theme good enough for developing a strong online brand?

No.

You absolutely need a premium theme. It looks beautiful, it’s easy to personalize, and it makes your work in maintenance much easier.

5. Install the Right Plugins

There are so many plugins for WordPress that the confusion is inevitable. Which ones do you need? If you install too many, you’ll only make the maintenance process difficult and you’ll make the website prone to crashes, slow performance, and security issues.

You only want the plugins that you’ll actually use. In addition to the back up plugin that we already talked about, you’ll need a few others:

• A site map plugin.You won’t need one if you get a really good SEO plugin. But if you don’t get a sitemap with the SEO plugin, you need to install a separate extension, such as the Google XML Sitemaps.

• A SEO plugin. Yoast SEO is the universal choice, simply because it’s really effective. It makes search engine optimization a breeze. Without proper search engine optimization, your content won’t be detectable through Google. We don’t want that.

• A caching plugin. The caching functions of your website make a difference in its speed and performance. Install W3 Total Cache or a similar plugin to take care of that.

• A spam-repelling plugin. You don’t want spammers flooding your comment section and making you look bad in the eyes of Google’s crawlers. Install Disqus or another spam-repelling plugin to prevent that from happening.

• A security plugin. This plugin will work asan antivirus program for your WordPress site. WordFence is a classic choice, but there are many others you can check out.

WordPress Is a Lot of Work… But You Can Do It!

WordPress seems like an easy platform at first. It iseasy, but there are so many layers to it that you’ll have to keep learning as you go. Don’t get fooled by the simplistic initial steps. It takes a lot of work and dedication to develop and maintain a brilliant website.

But you’re willing to make that effort, right? You’ll learn as you go, and you’ll make the start by following the five steps we listed above.