Building websites in WordPress is one of the most cost-effective website solutions. It is easily accessible and can often be installed directly from your hosting company console.
In this article, we will show you the best way to set up your WordPress settings before starting on your website build. Assuming you have a fresh install of WordPress, regardless of any theme or visual builder you use, we advise you do the following.
Before you continue, create a new page, you can label this Home page. This will make sure you can move forward with the below instructions. Make sure you hit save after editing the below settings.
Adjust your SETTINGS on the dashboard.
On your dashboard menu on the left, click on SETTINGS – General. Make sure you give your website a title and tagline. Keep your title the name of your business, and the tagline describe in short format your unique proposition example:
- Title: Deep Thought Website Design
- Tag: Website Design & Web Developer Cape Town
Next move down the page and select your site language, in our case its English (South Africa)
Select your time zone that you want your website to function on, ours is Johannesburg or +2 UTC
Select your website landing page.
Still in the SETTINGS section on your dashboard, click on Reading. Here you will be able to select your landing page. If your website is a blog, you can select Your Latest Posts. If your website is a standard business website, select A Static Page.
Following the above settings, you can now allocate your Home page. In this case we want it to be the Home page that we created earlier.
Note: make sure the box at the bottom of this page where it says Search Engine Visibility is NOT ticked.
Select your Permalink structure.
In the SETTINGS section on the dashboard menu, select Permalinks. On this page it will give you a few options on how you would like your page urls to display. Change this from the default setting to “Post name” option. Click save.
Now that we have the most important settings completed. Let’s move on to your Menu setting.
How to set up your WordPress Menu.
On your WordPress dashboard menu on the left side, navigate to APPEARANCE – Menus.
The first thing you want to do is create a new menu and give it a name. I like to use the name Main Menu. Make sure you tick the box below and allocate it as your Primary Menu. After creating your new Primary Menu (which will be the top menu across your entire website), you can now allocate a Page to your menu.
You can add the Home page that you created (and any future pages) to this menu. Remove any default menu items that may have come with your WordPress installation.
Now you have your basic setup complete, and you can move forward with your design and creating new pages and posts (articles).
We also advise that you delete the following:
- Sample page
- Sample post and sample comment
This way Google will not index your sample content which could make your business look unprofessional should someone stumble upon it. We hope this basic settings information is useful to you. If you get stuck you can always contact Deep Thought Media to assist you with your website design.