The Post-Installation WordPress Routine
One of my readers asked me if I was planning on continuing my “From Website to Blog” series. Yes I am, and you can read the first three parts here:
- Part 1: Pros and cons of changing a website into a blog
- Part 2: Initial steps for transforming a website into a blog
- Part 3: How to keep the old site alive while you prepare the new blog
This post isn’t strictly speaking a continuation of the series, it’s more of an aside. It’s about those boring and yet very necessary steps you need to take immediately after you install a new WordPress blog.
Installing WordPress
There are detailed instructions in the WordPress Codex on how to install WordPress. Most of us, though, don’t have to follow these instructions, since pretty much every web hosting service these days comes with a script to install new WordPress blogs. If your hosting service uses cPanel, for example, look for the Fantastico icon: you’ll find WordPress as one of the options. See Part 2 of my AdSense-Ready WordPress Blog series for detailed instructions on installing WordPress via Fantastico and cPanel. (For the record, of the two hosting services I use for blog hosting, ResellerZoom and Servage, only the former uses cPanel and Fantastico. Servage has its own script for installing WordPress that works just as well and is as easy to configure. The point is that the installation should be nearly trivial, no matter what hosting service you’re using. If not, it may be time to move to a different service…)
What we’re concerned about, however, is what happens immediately after the new installation is complete.
Step 1: Leave the Default Content Alone
A fresh WordPress install includes a default post (with a comment) and a default “about” page. I know it’s tempting to delete them right away, but don’t, for two reasons:
- You don’t want any crawlers coming to your site until you’re good and ready for them. By not modifying the content you ensure that no pings get sent to Ping-O-Matic prematurely.
- Having some content is the only way to make sure that your chosen theme (which you’ll probably be noodling with) looks right.
So just leave the content alone until you’re done with the other things.
Step 2: General Site Options
Immediately after installation, go to the Options and select the General tab. You’ll want to set some important things here as soon as possible: the blog title and description (if the installation script didn’t ask you for these), the blog address, the contact email, and the default timezone. For the blog address, you’ll want to decide now between the “www” and the “non-www” form of the domain name (if you’re not creating the blog as a subdomain): make your decision and stick to it. You’ll also need to modify the .htaccess to automatically redirect the “other” domain.
You should then go to Users and make sure that the administrative user (you) has the right options set. For example, I always go and turn off the visual editor.
Next, adjust the permalink structure to include the post name in the URLs. Very important for SEO purposes. (For general SEO advice, see AdSense and SEO For WordPress.)
Step 3: Plugin Installation
Now you’re ready to install some plugins. I have a folder on my local hard drive which stores the plugins I use. What I do is create a new folder for the blog I’m creating and then a “plugins” subfolder there. I copy all the plugins I want for that blog into that folder. I then use FileZilla (a free FTP program that I highly recommend) to copy the files over into the wp-content/plugins folder on the server hosting the blog. I then go and activate and configure the plugins. Here are my recommended plugins:
- Akismet to reduce comment spam. Pay the $5/month for the pro license, it’s well worth it, trust me on this…
- Enhanced WP-ContactForm lets you easily add spam-free contact forms to your blogs
- Google Sitemaps automatically generates a Google Sitemap for your blog
- Redirection to elegantly handle redirections
- SEO Siloing to build lists of posts by category
- Related Posts to add lists of related posts to any blog post
- Subscribe to Comments to let users subscribe to comment threads by email to keep those discussions going
- WordPress Duplicate Content Cure to keep search engines away from duplicate content
- WP-Print to create printable versions of posts
I also like the DoFollow plugin to remove nofollow attributes from links in comments, but I wouldn’t do that without a way to control comment spam…
Step 4: Theme Installation
This is both the easiest and the hardest step. Easy because all you do is copy the theme you want into the wp-content/themes folder and activate it. Hard because there are so many good themes out there to choose from!
However, no theme is perfect in my experience. You’ll always want to noodle with things. As with the plugins, I create a “themes” subfolder on my local hard drive and copy the theme there before uploading it to the site. I usually change its name slightly — both by changing the name of the folder and by modifying the name stored in the style.css file. I then make whatever initial changes I want and upload the modified theme to the server. What then follows is an iterative process of making small changes until I’m happy with the theme’s behavior.
Step 5: AdSense
If my blog has AdSense (or some other monetization scheme) on it, I’ll modify the theme appropriately. You can also use plugins like AdSense-Deluxe, but I prefer to modify the various theme files. You can use my free AdSensePHP script to make the code generation easier.
You probably don’t want to place live ads on your blog just yet, however. If you’re using AdSensePHP then the test mode is enabled by default, so that won’t be a problem. Otherwise you may just want to use <div> tags of the appropriate size to leave space for the ads while you play with things. You don’t want the ads showing up until you have some real content available — see How To Test Your AdSense Layouts for reasons why.
Step 6: Blogroll and Categories
Next I go and remove links I don’t want from the blogroll. I also rename the “Uncategorized” category to something more generic like “General”. Do whatever’s right for your blog here.
Step 7: Feeds
We’re almost ready. Now go to Options and select Reading. You need to select how many posts you want showing up in the feeds (and also on the home page) and whether your want complete or partial content in the feeds. Note that if you want full content in your feeds you need to follow my instructions on how to enable full feeds with WordPress.
Step 8: Create Your Static Pages
Now we can play with the precanned content. Go to the predefined “About” page and change the content to match what you’re site’s about. You can place a contact form here or else create a new page for it. You may also want to create privacy policy and disclaimer pages, depending on what you’re doing with the site. (The latter pages are important if you plan on sending AdWords traffic to the site.)
Step 9: Make Your First Post!
Finally, you’re ready to make the first post. Delete the old one and write the first post. Make it a good one!
Step 10: Back Everything Up
Now that your site is up and running, back everything up. The simple backup solution is to use your FTP application to copy the entire site down to your local hard disk and then use WordPress’ export facility to backup all the content into an XML file that you store locally as well. Unfortunately, this won’t get all your plugin settings — you need to backup the database that WordPress uses for this. Follow the WordPress backup instructions to grab everything. You may also want to look at the WordPress Database Backup plugin for an automatic backup solution.
That’s pretty much all I do. It’s a lot, and there’s always tweaking to do afterwards, I find, but the steps above get your blog started on the right footing and you generally go through it just once. If you’re a normal publisher you’re not creating many blogs at once, so there’s no need to automate things, just give yourself an hour or two to finish the install.
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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9 Responses to “The Post-Installation WordPress Routine”
Eric, a very informative post. Thanks for sharing your must-have WordPress plugins. I found a couple I didn’t know about that I’ll definitely be checking out.
Thanks for returning to this series; it’s very informative.
I think a recent comments section in your right hand menu would be a good addition to this site. It goes even further than the subscribe to comments plug-in, it helps people know what discussions are going on in posts they’ve not even participated in.
Done! I’m using Simple Recent Comments.
[...] well, there’s a little aside to the series on what to do to configure WordPress immediately after you install it that is also of [...]
Thanks for the great article! I always learn something everytime I read a post like this! Something to add might be to talk about adding in sidebar functionality – like the myBlogLog block, or technorati favorite link, etc.
oh- and on the bottom of your comment form you have a checkbox, which I assume is to for comment notification via email (but there is no text saying that). This is a bug in one of the versions of the ’subscribe to comments’ plugin – you have to to into Options->Subscribe to Comments and add the text into the right field for it to appear on the page, otherwise nobody knows what the checkbox is for.
thanks again!
Hey JT, glad you liked the post. And thanks for the headsup on the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin, because I hadn’t noticed that there were no messages being shown! I’ve fixed that now, though the plugin author should really do something to make it work by default…
Good and really useful post for all readers and specially for me, thanks!
Oh, and did not know about it. Thanks for the information …