If your website is powered by WordPress, then you know the adminstrators panel is full of different options. I know people who run their blog and barely touch their settings at all. WordPress is pretty much good to go out of the box, but there are a couple settings you should think about tweaking.
1. Privacy – You definitely want to check out this setting. I have heard rumours of people installing a fresh WordPress and their privacy settings are set to block search engines. It is worth a shot just to go into this setting really quickly and making sure that search engines can crawl your site. This is the only option to tweak in this particular settings menu so it is easy stuff. Most people will want to allow search engines because that is where most of your traffic will be coming from.
2. Discussion Settings – You can leave these settings alone if you want but there are a couple things I like to tweak. FIrst off I make sure the top option “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article. ” is clicked. This means when you have a link to another blog you will send a trackback to that blog. If the person allows trackbacks that could count as a back link for you. Back links are good things!
I also like to change my gravatar picture. This is a small step but it can add a lot to the aesthetics of your site. A lot of people who comment on your site will not have a gravatar, so the default will show up. The “mystery man” might be good enough for most, but if it looks bad on my blog I will want to change it. Sometimes I will go with blank and sometimes I will just pick the one that matches my site colors and theme.
3. Writing Settings – In here I like to set my own Default Categories and Link Categories. You can easily run your blog or website without doing this, but I feel it saves me time and effort. I hate having “Ungategorized” show up in my list of categories. If I change my default category to something else, it means I will probably never have to see uncategorized again. Sometimes I forget to categorize my posts and when that happens I won’t have to worry about Uncategorized showing up all of a sudden. Same goes with Link Categories. I only have one category of links that I use in my sidebar, so it makes sense to make that category the default.
This is truly just the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of settings you can tweak for your WordPress site. The above three are just a couple I make sure to do right away when I set up a site. These simple settings save me some time and I hope they can do the same for you.
