If you’re a novice WordPress developer, then the thought of making changes to your website settings may seem a challenging task to you. But in reality, “WordPress Settings” can help you manage your website settings in a hassle-free manner. The settings screen can be located from the WordPress dashboard, and offers plenty of options to customize your site that comes under the Settings menu (as shown in the image below).
Through this post, I intend to explore the most important options available to you for various WordPress settings as listed below:
General
Writing
Reading
Discussion
Media
Permalinks
General Settings
This is where you can control some of the most basic yet relevant configuration settings for your website, such as:
Set Title. This field enables you to set your site’s title that you likely want to show up at different places within your site.
Tagline. The contents within this field are either short phrases or slogan that conveys users what you website is all about.
WordPress Address (URL). Here you need to enter the full directory URL including your WordPress core application files like wp-admin, wp-config.php, etc. For instance, if you’ve installed WordPress into a directory named as ‘blog’, then the WordPress URL will look something like:
http://mysite.net/blog //mysite.net is your website domain name
If you have installed WordPress in the root directory, then WordPress Address(URL) will be the same as root URL i.e. http://mysite.net.
Site Address (URL). Your user profile’s email address will come here. Make sure that the address that is entered is correct, as it will help your users to reach your site/blog.
Membership Settings. This comes with a few user registration options. The first one allows you to register a user, you can leave the box unchecked if you don’t want to register a user. The second one, help you choose the default role for your newly registered members.
Timezone. This is the first timezone related setting with a dropdown list, allowing you to pick a city with the same timezone as your city. In case, you’re not able to identify a city within your timezone, you can choose any one of the Etc GMT settings.
Date Format. This is a date related settings that displays dates on your site from any one of the following formats:
February 06, 2015
2015/02/06
06/12/2015
Time Format. This is the second time related setting that shows time throughout your website, in any one format as shown below:
12:58pm
12:58PM
12:58
Week Starts On. This date and time related settings allows you to pick a start date from the dropdown list for your site calendar.
Now that you’ve made all the aforementioned changes don’t forget to click on the “Save Changes” button.
Reading Settings
This section allows you to choose what’s displayed on your home page – that can either be your blog posts or web pages. The next section lets you control how your content is displayed in the RSS Feeds. And the last one allows you to make your site/blog visible to search engines, however, you can prevent search engines crawlers to index your site by clicking on the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” box.
Discussion Settings
This field is mainly intended for blogs. The Discussion section comes loaded with options that helps to enhance reader’s interaction on your blogs. The settings within the Discussion screen help you deal with links, trackbacks, comments on your posts.
Media Settings
Almost every website contains visual content in the form of images, videos, and other media elements. Thanks to the WordPress Media Settings, you can easily handle all the media files in a quick and organized manner. For example, you can define the size of an image when adding to it to “Media Library” (as shown in the following screenshot).
Privacy Settings
Do you want search engine crawlers to index your website or not? In case you set up your Privacy Settings to “Public”, then it means your site can be indexed by search engines. But, if you’re setting up some personal blog and want to hide it from users then you can set the Privacy Settings to “Private”.
Permalink Settings
Lastly, it is very important for you to decide how your permalinks will look like. You are likely going to find things on this page a little confusing, but setting your permalinks is pretty easy. For instance, you can choose to set your page’s permalink structure to something that reflects your web page or posts name (e.g. a page entitled “Service Offerings” permalink could be “http://www.mysite.net/service-offerings/”). This will make your site’s URLs easily readable for the users, and will also help in improving your site’s search engine optimization. Below are a few common settings that you can find in the Settings Permalinks Screen:
- Default
- Day and Name
- Month and Name
- Numeric
- Post name
- Custom structure
Let’s Wrap Up!
As a beginner it is very important for you to become familiar with your WordPress site’s settings. This will help you immediately customize your blog or website without any confusion related to the settings you need to manage and how.
Author Bio:
This post is brought to you by Samuel Dawson, working as front-end developer for Designs2HTML Ltd. a leading PSD to HTML5 conversion company and he shares concrete information, latest trend & tips on front-end development technologies.
