The installation of WordPress is very simple and within minutes you can get a blog up and running.
Once you have finished installing WordPress there are a number of measures that must be taken if you want to get the most from your website.
Use the following list as points to follow for future installations or just to double check if there is something that you have not done yet (+1400 words post).
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1. Modify the Structure of Permalinks
Permalinks are simply the address with which to store each individual post or page of your blog.
To make sure that this will not be saved only by a number (the default), you can modify the structure, so that it appears at least the title of the post.
Under the menu of your WordPress dashboard, select “Settings> Permalinks”.
I use “Post Name” : http://nopassiveincome.com/sample-post/
2. Change Title and Tagline
Using your keywords in Title and Tagline may help you improve your SEO rankings .
Under the menu “Settings> General”, in the proper field, you can simply change your Blog Title.
After that, there is the tagline, that is your blog subtitle.
You should find an appealing sentence!
Mine is : “Take Action, There Is No Passive Income” .
3. Change the Theme
If you want to take blogging seriously, then you need to get a premium WordPress theme.
It’s not about just looking professional, your readers are also going to enjoy navigating in a easy to use website.
So be sure to get an original and well-functioning theme.
I use a personalized Genesis Framework theme, called “Magazine PRO”.
It’s HTML5 and mobile responsive.
4. Create an XML Sitemap
This is the system to notify Google about your blog content and its updates.
The XML sitemap lists the pages of your website and inform search engines about other important information.
Creating an XML sitemap on a WordPress blog is incredibly easy.
You simply need to install “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin (it’s version Version 4.0.8, at the moment).
Here’s mine : http://nopassiveincome.com/sitemap.xml
5. Install a Spam Filtering Plugin
The most popular way to prevent spam comments is trough “Akismet”.
Used by millions of bloggers, this plugin will protect your blog from SPAM comments and trackbacks.
After installing WordPress, just visit your “Plugins” dashboard menu, then search, download and activate Akismet.
Visit Akismet.com and sign up for an API key.
Now add it to settings configuration page of the plugin and save.
I use Akismet in combination with “Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin”, also know as G.A.S.P.
It will add a client side generated checkbox to the comment form, requesting that the user check it in order to prove that he’s not a spammer.
Bots will not be able to mark this checkbox, so their SPAM comments will be discarded.
Get GASP, with CommentLuv premium plugin.
6. Register your Domain to Google Webmaster Tools
This is something really useful later on.
It takes just a few minutes and will give you several information, like how many of your pages are indexed by Google, loading speed of your site with relation to others, crawling errors (and how to fix them), and many more useful data.
Here the link of the service : Google Webmaster Tools.
When you register to GWT, you need to prove that you are the owner of the website. Just choose between the few options on how to do it.
7. Install Google Analytics
This is another must have tool from Google (and most of all FREE).
Just log in to Google Analytics and install the code into your blog pages.
Google Analytics will give you a lot of useful information, as number of unique visitors, pageviews, average time spent on your site, bounce rate and a lot of other juicy information that will help you improve your blog.
8. Install a Cache Plugin
It’s suggested to install a Cache Plugin, in order to cache the pages of your blog and deliver them to visitors without accessing the database, making your site much faster.
I’m sure you know it, that loading speed is one of the 200 factors that Google consider for search engine results.
I use “WP Super Cache” plugin on most of my sites.
I suggest you to install it, as it improves the speed and user experience of your blog.
You can add browser, page, object and database caching as well as minify and content delivery network (CDN) to WordPress.
WP Super Cache, with “W3 Total Cache”, are considered as the highest rated and most complete WordPress performance plugins.
9. Create a Favicon
The favicon is that 16×16 pixel icon you can see next to a website, when visiting it with your preferred internet browser.
There are many online favicon creators, but I particularly like this one: Favicon.cc
Can you see the favicon associated to NoPassiveIncome?
I used “Genesis Favicon uploader” plugin for uploading my favicon.
10. Create a Contact Page
It is certainly important that your readers and visitors can contact you easily.
I used “Contact Form 7” WordPress plugin for building my Contact Page.
With a contact form, easily accessible on your blog, people may contact you for advertising, consulting or business opportunities.
11. Create an About Page
See my About page here.
I tell you a bit about myself and I explain the goals of NoPassiveIncome blog.
Also, I take occasion to ask readers to subscribe for blog updates.
At the end of the page, I also list the guest posts I wrote for other blogs and all the interviews I participated to.
Finally, a real picture of yourself is a must here!
12. Add RSS to Feedburner
Feedburner is another free popular service offered by Google.
You can get your RSS feeds “burned” in a matter of few minutes.
It offers several features like analysis of your subscribers or optimization of your feeds.
This is the link of my RSS feeds.
13. Integrate your Blog with Social Media
Social media is a must for any bloggers.
You always want to give your readers an easy opportunity to share your content via the most popular social media channels.
I use “Monarch Social Sharing Plugin“, by Elegant Themes.
I love how it looks! It’s responsive and the design is awesome.
14. Set Your 404 Error Page
If someone digit incorrectly some of the URLs of your site, you should help them finding what they want.
I use “Smart 404” plugin : when content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically.
15 . Take Care of SEO
You know that SEO is so much important for your site and you want to optimize your content, in order to attract a lot of organic traffic.
Some great plugins are “All in One SEO Pack” or “Yoast WordPress SEO“.
They will help you with the most important SEO tasks at you blog, like settings the keywords of a page or the meta information.
16. Check Internal Links
You don’t want to have broken internal links.
I use and suggest “Broken Link Checker” plugin, which checks your blog for broken links and missing images and notifies you on the dashboard if any are found.
17. Be Mobile
With so many smartphones and tablets around, we are in the middle of a mobile internet revolution.
Have you ever checked how many visitors you got from mobile devices?
No? Well, you should.
I bet at least 30% of your users are visiting your blog from their smart phone.
You should then set your site in order to be viewed easily from a mobile gadget, otherwise it may take too long to load, becoming really difficult to be consulted on mobile.
Here’s a guide on setting a mobile-friendly website.
18. Add widgets to the sidebar
Widgets are the real magic of WordPress.
Select, drag and drop and in a moment you can create a sidebar full of great features for your readers.
I use the social widget offered by Monarch Social Sharing Plugin and the “Popular Posts” one by Genesis.
19. Fix the Footer
Depending on the theme you are going to choose, you will want to modify the footer credits.
You may also add some widgets to the footer.
I use “Top Commentators Widget”, to reward the most active commentators at my blog.
I have also the BroadedNet widget, to show good reads around blogopshere (do you need traffic without SEO or social media? Read how to get it with BroadedNet).
In my footer I have also the “search” and “archive” functions, as well as the link to my “Privacy Policy” page.
20. Publish Your First Post
Now it’s time to remove the “Hello World” default post, set the categories of your blog and create your first post.
Happy blogging! 🙂
Conclusion
I hope this small guide is going to help you with the things to do after installing WordPress in your blog or simply as check list.
Have you found something that you have not done yet?
Or may be, do you have any other suggestions to add?
Please let me have your thoughts in the comments below, thanks!
Photo credit at https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/2/000/22a/36b/10502c0.jpg
Hi Erik,
#1 is beyond huge. Fab tips all around!
I changed permalinks immediately when I went WP because it’s good for branding, for being professional and search engines love seeing keywords versus generic numbers. Takes a second to do. Weirdly enough, after my developer installed my new custom theme before I noted the generic permalink pop up on twitter. On checking again all looks OK. Either way I’m on it because going custom helps make a big impression on your audience.
Thanks dude great post!
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
good to see you.
I remember to have not changed permalinks at all with my very first blog.
Huge mistake.
But you know, we may learn a lot from our errors!
Hope you’re enjoying your stay at that fantastic house at Bali.
Have a great week, mate. 🙂
Hey Erik,
Great one! These are the most basic things which should not be missed at the beginning because when you later change it things go complicated at times.
Nice resource Mate!
Thanks for visiting and commenting, my friend.
Glad you liked the post.
Hope it helps some new (or even experienced) bloggers!
Hi Erik Sir,
As always you are rocking with useful tutorials.
I am happy to say that I did all the things you have mentioned here.
Thank you so much.
What do I say further sir?
Looking forward to another awesome post.
Regards,
Rahul
Hi Rahul,
that’s great to hear you completed every step in this list.
You are doing an awesome job at your blog.
Keep up the great work and soon it will be popular.
Thanks for visiting and commenting here today.
Hi Erik,
These are some great tips especially for a new blogger who has just installed WordPress. It takes some time before someone gets familiar with WordPress. Permalinks are an important part of the blog. One should configure it at the very beginning. Because it’s not recommended to change it later. It affects the SEO of the blog in a negative manner.
Thanks for sharing these tips.
Hi Brian,
you’re right.
There is so much to learn about WordPress, that it takes indeed some time to become familiar with this CMS.
Appreciate your visit and comment here today.
Have a great week.
Hi Erik.
It’s good to have a checklist like this, even when we have much experience. It can be so easy to miss something important from time to time,
Thanks for the reminder about Feedburner. I didn’t really set it up fully until now!
Thanks for sharing.
Nathan.
Hi Nathan,
good to hear this list made you finish to set up Feedburner.
Going to visit your blog post right now,
thanks for leaving your views here!
WOW!!
This is a very detailed to do list! There are several things I missed after installing my WordPress! I will be going through this list point by point to see if I got everything.
Thank you,
– Nestor
Hello Nestor,
great to hear this list is going to help you improve your blog.
That’s exactly the aim of this post! 🙂
Thanks for reading and commenting,
have a great week.
Hello Erik,
Good checklist for old WordPress user and helpful for newbie. You mention here some great points that every WP user should consider to make their blog user friendly as well as search engine friendly.
Hello Fakharuddin,
thanks for your comment.
Have a great day!
COol list. I like the favicon thing. I totally forgot about doing that. 🙂
Thanks.
-Paul
Hi Paul,
good to hear this post helped you somehow.
Thanks for commenting! 🙂
Hey Erik! This list of yours will help a lot of new bloggers. Especially if they are kinda lost and don’t know which to do first after installing WordPress.
A lot of bloggers knew that WordPress is the easiest and popular CMS. Little they know that there are things that one must do before he can really start with posting pages and articles. That’s what you have shown them.
Hello Arsie,
there are so many things to do after installing WordPress.
It may seems an easy to use CMS, but you need a lot of time to be considered an “expert”! 😉
Thanks for visiting and commenting,
have a good one.
Such a wounderful collection. You have just a whole complex topic in wordpress with easy of writing, I use FW for creating and Designing both my logo and favicon,I never know that online favicon exist. Thanks a lot for the tips.
Hi Onyema,
glad you enjoyed the post.
Thanks for the comment,
keep following. 🙂
Hi Erik,
How you doing ? and Its been a long time 🙂
Great post that you’ve given,Your article describes that you’re expert in relevant field and people will believe your words and your suggestions is always the best solution for any issues.
You speak less but your blog doesn’t it right ? 😉
I would like to add few more points with respect to all above points mentioned that is we need have concern on security plugins and .htaccess file and it should be on top of our list after installing word press blog.
Once again a super check list that you’ve made and given us
I have Stumbled it and will definitely come back to refer to your suggestions when I work on my blogs.
Thanks for your post & Great week ahead
Siva
Hello Siva,
good to see you again.
Everything is going great, I hope the same for you.
I see you are doing a good job at your blog, keep up the fantastic job there!
Thanks for adding the suggestions about securing our blogs.
I have few plugins for that purpose.
Hope this guide will help some new bloggers (or even experienced ones) with the improvement of their websites.
Glad you liked the post, thanks for leaving your comment.
Talk to you soon! 🙂
Hi Erik
Excellent guide to help newbies know what steps to take on their blog. You have created the list based on relevance and with this every newbie can figure which step is important when working on their blog. Thank you for sharing such guide and thumbs up.
Hi Ikechi,
glad you enjoyed the post.
Thanks for the comment! 🙂
There’s so much to do after installing WordPress. But it will only consume less of time if you will focus on accomplishing your list of things to do. The list you shared with us is useful and no doubt informative, most especially to beginners. This will keep them on the track and make things done fast. A very useful guide indeed! I will share this, you can guarantee that! 🙂
Hello Metz,
you’re right.
If installing WordPress is not a difficult task, there are then so many things to study and understand.
Plugins, widgets, CSS, etc.
Hope this guide will help some new bloggers (or even experienced ones) with the improvement of their websites.
Glad you liked the post, thanks for leaving your comment.
Couldn’t have made it any clearer. VERY WELL DONE list Erik!
People tend to skip 3/4 of those and it’s the little things like that that comes back to haunt them in the future.
Great work my friend
Thanks for the kind feedback, Dennis.
Hope this guide will help some new bloggers (or even experienced ones) with the improvement of their websites.
Have a great rest of this week, my friend! 🙂
Most of steps I didn’t do after install.. Won’t do this again.. hope next time I will complete all these steps after inslatting wordpress..
Glad this list helped you, Adam.
Thanks for leaving your comment.
Hi erik,
You have mentioned all of the important tasks which should be done after installing WordPress. Newbies will find this tutorial very helpful. Even I have also bookmarked this post.
Thanks
Glad you enjoyed the post, Rahul.
Thanks for commenting.
Great list here. I am glad to see that I am using several items on your list. I especially like WP Super Cache. I found disqus to be the best solution for spam filtering, so far at least.
Hi George,
I heard several feedbacks about Disqus, all of them different.
I guess if you are happy, just stick with it.
I still prefer WordPress.
I think you can get many more comments with it.
But we could discuss so much about which blog commenting system adopt, right?
I agree with you that you will get much fewer comments with disqus.So far, it keeps nearly 100% of spammers away. I guess that’s the price you pay. I don’t think there is one commenting system that is perfect. If there is, I haven’t found it yet 🙂
I guess it really depends from what you prefer.
It’s much better for me having more comments (real, of course), that fewer spam ones.
Even if I spend 5 minutes daily to clean SPAM folder or to double check distrusted comments.
Thanks for sharing your experience, George! 🙂
Hi Erik,
Nice share. You have covered nice tips here. We should work on our blog from day one of launching your blog.
Thanks for sharing these tips 🙂
Hi Kuldeep,
that’s right!
Hard work will pay off in future.
Thanks for being here,
have a great friday. 🙂
Hi Eric Sir,
Thanks for your awesome post. Actually I am using blogger so I am not aware much with wordpress. But I have done wordpress SEO works for some clients. So I see these all there.
This post is like a full wordpress guide for a beginner.
Thanks a lot again.
With Regards,
Naveen
Hello Naveen,
thanks for the kind feedback.
As you said, hope this will be a great guide for beginners!
Appreciate your visit and comment.
Hey Erik,
This is the ultimate list to have when after you installed wordpress
I can definitely say that I wish that I had this list after I installed wordpress when I first started.
But you know what?
Some of us veterans do have to look at these types of list to see if they’re something we can add or if there’s something missing within our blog.
I pretty much get everything set, but i like to use another Social Sharing Plugin.. The reason being is that I like to have something different (change is good) and also I like to add widgets for peopel to find me on the different social media sites I’m active on!
I like to tip my hat off to you for coming up with this list! This is definitely a list no one should overlook! Thanks for sharing!
Hello Sherman,
glad you liked this list!
You see,
talking about social sharing plugins, I use to not pay much attention to which one I had on my blog,
then I discovered the Monarch Social Sharing plugin from ElegantThemes, and I love it!
Design is awesome and is completely mobile responsive.
Sometimes are little things that make the difference.
Appreciate your visit here and commenting.
Thanks for sharing!
Hey Erik,
Wonderful piece of content. Yes, the things you’ve mentioned are very important to do after installing wordpress.. Often people forget to track their data with Google analytics which is very important to do. Use of Premium theme is a great way to grab more attention of audience.
This post reminds me the mistakes which I had done in the past. 😛
Thanks for share.
-Mustafa
Hi Mustafa,
thanks for the kind words!
This post aim just to that, to help people avoid making specific mistakes.
You’re right.
You never have a second chance to make a first good impression.
So yes, a premium theme is a must, if you want to take blogging seriously.
Thanks for commenting,
have a great friday.
Hi Erik,
This is a good reminder!
I have done almost all of these lists, which missed is checking broken links on my blog. And I just checked it using the plugin that you suggest. Thanks for that 🙂
By the way, I have some questions:
About permalinks, I see you use “post name”, and I use the “month and name.” Which one is best in your opinion?
Then, can I change my permalink to post name?
When it changed, will it affect my articles because my previous permalink?
Thanks before for your answer, Erik.
Thanks for sharing as well. Have a great week!
~Nanda
Hi Nanda,
glad you liked the post!
Happy to hear you learned something new here.
The “Broken Links Checker” plugin is pretty simple, but it does that job really well, saving you big time (and improving overall your blog and user experience).
As per permalinks, with my first blog I used “month and name”, but I kept hearing suggestions to change that, since the beginning of my blogging career (5 years ago).
That’s why now I use “post name”, as it seems to be better in terms of SEO (you can focus on your keywords and make the URL search engines friendly).
If you change permalinks on your blog (switching for example from “Month and Name” to “Post name”),this will now update all of your internal URLs with the new syntax.
All of the internal links should update correctly if they have been added as part of WordPress. Any manual links may need to be updated.
All links to your site from elsewhere will now be completely broken and all the content indexed by search engines will be incorrect.
There is a simple solution to this problem and that is to setup 301 redirects on your website.
A 301 redirect essentially tells any browser that comes to your site using an old permalink structured URL where the relevant content is. It also lets search engines know that this is a permanent change.
For this purpose, I recommend the Simple 301 Redirects plugin:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-301-redirects/
I know, it’s not an easy task, but this is what you need to do to change permalinks on an already run WordPress site.
Hope it helps!
Thank you for your clear answer, Erik. 🙂
I have tried to install this plugin according to your suggestions.
With this plugin, I can remove the date that is included in my post URL and when clicked the link will lead to the original URL that has a date on it. Does that mean I don’t have to change my permalink become “post name”? Since it would make me lose all the comments and shares.
Please forgive if this question disturb you, but I really want to know about it. Thanks before for your answer. 🙂
Regards,
Nanda
Before you change your permalinks (depending on the new one you choose, if “post name”, then go for it), and then you do the procedure as explained in my previous comment.
Here’s a post on keeping social share count after changing WordPress Permalinks:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24413305/keeping-social-share-count-after-changing-wordpress-permalinks
And no, you won’t lose your comments.
Hope it helps!
A perfect article i’d like to share with one of my buddy who just got his first domain and set it up on WordPress.
Till then let me go back to my blog and check if i missed out on any od the points mentioned above.
BTW will have to say that Akismet have reduced a lot of spamming on my blog and still is doing.
Thank you Erik! Have a nice weekend!
Hi Atif,
that’s the aim of this post, helping some new bloggers doing the most important things after installing WordPress.
Thanks for sharing!
A perfect post for newbie bloggers who’s are wanted to start a blog on WordPress.
Even I also made a mistake while starting my blog on WordPress.
Now everyone should give importance on No. 17. Because Google now prefer mobile friendly site first in SERP rank..
BTW thanks for this awesome post. Erik Sir.
We all made mistakes at beginning, Hamim.
I think it’s completely normal.
I heard about it too.
I’ve recently written an article about how to make a website mobile-friendly:
http://nopassiveincome.com/how-to-make-mobile-friendly-blog/
Thanks for commenting,
have a good rest of this week, Hamim.
Hi Erik,
Great agenda for old WordPress client and accommodating for amateur. You say here some awesome focuses that each WP client ought to consider to make their website easy to understand and internet searcher amicable.
Thanks Rahul!
Great thanks for sharing with us its very helpful I don’t know about it.
Thank you once again Erik
Hey Ankush,
good to hear you learned something new from this post.
Thanks for commenting!
Hello Erik, Nice post mate. Anti spam plugin Akismet, I believe comes already installed in all wordpress installations so less work to do here. And you very rightly mentioned about making the blog Mobile friendly as Google has started paying more attention towards user-friendliness and cross device compatibility.
Yes, IMNabeel.
You’re right.
With default WordPress installation, you already get Akismet plugin.
The only thing you need to do is getting the API key.
Is your blog mobile-friendly?
I guess so!
Thanks man ! you solved my favicon problem 🙂 i also use Genesis
Glad you found a solution to your problem in this post, Jahanzeb. 🙂
Nice to do list .
These tweaks are really important to create fabulous blog.
Thanks for your feedback, Sharad.
Keep visiting.
Hi Erik,
When I started my blogging career I never came across like this post, I came to know one by one by reading various articles, this post will help all the new bloggers a lot to maintain their blog suitable for SEO, permalinks, Yoast SEO, contact page are my favorite one to take care of immediately.
Thanks a lot for sharing the information.
Hi Siddaiah,
thanks a lot for the kind feedback.
Hope to see some new bloggers learn from this post!
I have recently created a blog and your post identified that my blog was missing two things; Spam Filtering Plugin and Favicon. Thanks for the great post 🙂
Good to hear you learned something new here, Aqib.
Thanks for visiting.
Hi Eric Sir,
Thanks for your awesome article. Actually I have a blog on wordpress, actully i am confused that what is Akismet plugin do. But now i am activate Akismet plugin Today and safe my website from Spam.
Thanks a lot again.
Yes, it helps you fight SPAM comments, Charanjeet.
Happy blogging!