On today’s episode, we’ll talk about the best practices for configuring a new Word Press website right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast Episode 256. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin. And today, we are going to be talking about the best practices for setting up a brand new Word Press site. But before we get to that, let’s talk about a couple of announcements. We’re going to be talking about a Word Press webinar that’s happening next Friday that is Friday, November 6 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. We’re going to talk about how to restore a site from back up.

We’ll look at a couple of different methods. If you’ve ever tried to restore a site from back up, it’s kind of tedious if you’re not really familiar with how things work. And we’re especially going to look at Back WP Up is going to be the main one we look at. Back WP Up is the free plug-in in the Word Press repository. And that’s the one that we’re going to highlight exclusively. But we’ll look at a couple of other options as well. So if you’re interested head on over to Your Website Engineer.com/webinar, and sign up for that. And you’ll get notifications about when that’s about to start and whatnot.

And you’ll get a notification the day of like here’s the webinar replay if you can’t make it. So be sure to sign up if you’re interested in seeing that content. Another thing that’s in the Word Press news this week is actually Word Press 4.4 Beta 1 is now available. So if you are one of those types, like myself, who like to go in and play around with the new versions of Word Press, go ahead and download Word Press 4.4 Beta 1. And it is still under development. So don’t run this on any live site, of course. But some of the new features that are in Word Press 4.4 2016 is the newest default theme, responsive images.

So Word Press is now automatically delivering more appropriate sized images for users based on the screen size that they are using or the view port size and the screen resolution, all those good things. And then embeds is another feature for Word Press 4.4. And now, Word Press can now rich embed content from nearly all sites that support the O Embed support. So not just You Tube, Flicker, Twitter and the like. You can even do embeds of preview posts from other Word Press sites by pasting the URL on the own line, which is really, really cool. Also, what’s in Word Press 4.4 is the Rest API Phase 1.

The Rest API, we talked about it a few weeks ago, a huge, huge feature that’s coming to Word Press. And this is just the first part of that. So if you’re interested in learning more about that, you can see, in the show notes, there’s a link to the news page over at Word Press.org. And you can read more about it if you’d like. They’re also doing term metadata. So this is now taxonomy term metadata is now included. And so usually, we’ve had to use plug-ins in the past to do that. And they’re actually deprecating the function at WP_Title. So if you are building themes and whatnot, there is some documentation on how to fix that stuff in your upcoming versions of your theme and plug-in and whatnot.

So and then comment queries are now split for performance. And so they’re working on some things along those lines. So if you find a bug, go ahead and test it out. Find a bug, and then you can report it on the alpha/beta area in the forums, and then you can make sure that other people know about the bugs as well. Another thing that I just wanted to point out in just the way of news is there’s an article over on Woo Themes about the Woo-matic update. And just to highlight of Forty-seven 3 Month Old Automaticians in the future, and that’s the title of the post. And so basically, there were 47 people that moved from Woo Themes to become automaticians.

And just if you’re interested in knowing what’s coming in the future for Woo Themes and what’s coming in the future for Automatic, this is a great, great post to just kind of highlight some of the things that have happened in the last three months and some of the things that are coming in the future. So if you’re interested in that, be sure to take a look at that as well. And then, let’s see, if you are ever interested in proposing a question for an upcoming show, feel free to email me, dustin@yourwebsiteengineer.com. And just let me know. I’ve got a lot of ideas, but some of them are too in depth and too visual to make into podcast episodes.

But I’m always looking for show ideas and always looking for ways to improve the show. So any feedback or any questions that you may have, feel free to send them over my way. Or you can use the contact form on Your Website Engineer.com. And that’s all for that section, the news section of the show. Let’s move on to the is there a plug-in for that section. This plug-in that I found is called Con Bon for Word Press. And it is a complete Con Bon board for project management inside your Word Press sites. And so this is really kind of a neat thing. If you’ve ever been in manufacturing and know what a Con Bon board is, this is kind of a really cool thing.

It’s almost like a trello board, but not quite. So if you’re looking for some sort of way to display all types of projects and like the cards and the things that we should be working on on a project, you can track hours, you can give estimations of how long each card should take, you can create custom views. You can do a lot of really cool things. A brand new plug-in, it’s only been out there for two weeks. So if that’s something that you’re interested in, head on over to just search for Con Bon in the Word Press repository, or you can find a link in the show notes for Episode 256.

So let’s talk about the best practices for configuring your new Word Press site. So imagine you’re just installing a brand new site, and then you’re just kind of getting up and running. What are the settings, what are the things that you can do to make sure that you’re doing all of this right? And I want to say, right off the bat, this is a really neat way to actually create a blue print inside of desktop server. And so desktop server is the software that I use when I launch a brand new website. I always do it locally first, and then I export it to a place on the server somewhere. And what you can actually do is you can follow all of these steps, and then you can save that as a blue print.

And when you do the next version, when you create a brand new site in desktop server the next time, you can create that blue print. And then from there, you don’t have to do all of this stuff over again, which is really pretty neat. But let’s go ahead and talk about it first. And then at the end, we’ll talk about the desktop server thing again just real quick. So the very first thing that once I install Word Press, I’ve logged in for the very first time, I go ahead and close that welcome screen. My big screen on the dashboard, I just go ahead and close it.

And even if you hit the little X, and you close it out, if you ever want to turn it back on, say you have a client that needs it for their very first look inside of Word Press, then you can go ahead and go to the screen options tab and just say the welcome screen, and you can check that check box. And then from there, it will automatically appear back on your dashboard. So don’t think you have to keep it open for weeks and weeks and weeks just because the people that may be running this site later may need it. So that’s something to think about. So that’s the very first thing that I’d do is I’d just go ahead and remove that welcome screen so my dashboard is not cluttered up with that stuff.

It’s basic links of how to add a post and how to add a page and all that stuff that I know how to use already. So I just go ahead and remove it. The next thing I do is I remove all the sample content. So that’s the hello world post, the sample page, and the Mister Word Press comment. That stuff is not really needed. And you can go ahead and remove it. Sometimes, if you wanted to keep the sample page for a little while just to see how the different formatting things work, what’s the H1 tag versus the H2 tag versus the H3 tag? What does the block quote look like? What colors are the links?

You can do that kind of stuff on there kind of as a sample page. But just make sure that once you’re done with the site or whatever, you want to trash that. You want to trash all of those things. Then you can actually empty the trash so they’re gone pretty much forever. There’s really no need to keep those around and keep them hanging out because they’re just going to clutter things up. And you don’t want them to be displayed on your website. The next thing that I do is I get rid of that stuff, and I go right to the plug-ins area. And I delete the Hello Dolly plug-in, which is something that you don’t need any more.

You definitely don’t need it. You can activate the Akizmet plug-in. And so that’s another thing that I do. I always make sure that I’m running Akizmet on my websites to make sure that, I guess if it’s working on a development site, you don’t actually have to activate it right away. But if you’re doing this on a live server somewhere, you want to go ahead and activate it. And then the next piece of the puzzle is install and activate Jet Pack. And then again, that has the same caveat. If it’s local, you can install it so it’s there, and it’s ready to go. But you don’t necessarily have to connect it until you are on a live server somewhere.

So that’s kind of some of the general housekeeping things. I also go into the themes area. And when I’m in the themes area, I want to make sure that I’m removing any of the themes that I’m not going to need. Maybe while I’m testing and building a website and getting it up and running, I’ll keep one of the default themes like 2015. I’ll keep that for a little while. But then once I know that everything is working, and I like the theme that I’m using currently, then I just go ahead and get rid of it. And you may be saying, Dustin, why don’t you just keep it around just in case? You can if you really want to.

But, occasionally, they’re going to come out with updates. You’re going to have to update it. And my train of thought is if you ever need to troubleshoot an issue on your Word Press site, just go ahead and re-download it. It takes a few minutes to download and reconfigure. And it won’t take that long. And it will make sure that your site is as secure as possible. We don’t want to have some sort of open back door that we forget to update that theme one day. And then all of a sudden, our site is compromised because we’ve got an extra theme in there. So that’s another thing you want to do as well.

The user section is another area that I go into, especially if I am taking over a site, or I accidentally created the user name admin. We definitely don’t want to do that. So we want to go in and make sure the default user name is not admin. And it’s kind of tricky to actually change that user name. There’s not really an easy way to do that. The only way to do it is you create another instance or another user. And then you log out as the admin. You log back in as this new administrator user. And then you can delete the admin user account. Wow, that’s a mouthful.

But, basically, you don’t want to have the user name as admin because that used to be the standard default Word Press like if you didn’t select the thing as a user name, that’s just what came. And so if people know that your user name is admin or it tries admin, then it just takes that much less time to hack into your site. So you want to make sure that that is set up as well. The next area that we want to look at is those general settings. So the settings on the left hand side on your dashboard. It’s all the way down at the bottom. Well, it’s not all the way at the bottom.

It’s at the bottom when you first install Word Press, and you don’t have any plug-ins running. Sometimes, when you’re using plug-ins, those will be underneath the general settings. But in general, when you open up the Word Press site for the first time, you’ll be able to get to the settings in that very bottom, left hand menu area. And so the first place is the general area. So you want to make sure your site title and tag line is correct. If you need to make any modifications, go ahead and do that there. Verify that your URL is correct. Now, I don’t want to say that you want to change it there. If you change it there, it could do some really wicked things and kind of mess some things up.

And so you want to make sure it’s correct. If it is incorrect, there are some documentation guidelines online the best way to change that without breaking a lot of things, so I recommend doing that. Then the big thing is you want to go and make sure the time zone is set to the current time zone. I know that the mistake is made a lot. And people will keep it at the plus zero UTC time. And so when they go to schedule a post, it will be off by hours because I know where I live in Dayton, Ohio, it’s plus four UTC. So if I try to schedule a post at 4:00 in the afternoon, it’s actually going to go off at noon. It’s going to be off.

So you want to make sure that you have that current time zone set. And then you want to change what day the week starts on. And I think that’s just in case you have a calendar. I’m not exactly sure how that piece of the puzzle works. I always change it to Sunday because, technically, in the United States, our week starts on Sunday. And that’s how the calendar looks. And that’s the way that it works. So those are the things that I change in the general settings area. Next is the writing area. And in the writing settings, I don’t really update a lot of things. Later, if you decide that you’re using one category very, very regularly, you can change that to the default post category.

But there’s not a lot to do there in the writing section. In the reading section, you can look at the different options. And depending on how you’re going to set up your theme, you may want to change the front page display as section. And it depends if you want to have your blog on your home page, or you just want to have a static home page. You can make that change if necessary. And then you can make adjustments on the number of items that are shown on your blog pages. And so you can keep it at 10. That’s the default. Or you can change it down to five. You can put it up to 100.

You don’t really want to do 100 because it would take forever for your pages to load. But you can make those changes as well. You can also manage how many items show up in your syndication. So if somebody would subscribe via RSS, how many items will show up in their RSS feed or if they are signing up for the very first time. And so you can change this one to 100 or 1,000 or whatever. You can just make that so that everybody can get everything when they start subscribing via RSS. Then you want to make sure that the site is visible to everyone. If you’re running on a development site, you don’t have to check this box right away.

But you want to make sure that this is something, when you launch the site, you want to make sure that Google is actually seeing your site and indexing your site. Otherwise, people won’t find it, and search engines won’t find it. When it comes to the discussion settings, I keep all of the settings the same. There’s not a lot of stuff in there that, for most of the time, when I’m setting up a website, really needs changed. But you can go through there with a fine tooth comb and decide whether you want to moderate your comments, whether or not they should be monitored for certain words.

So if people say the word spam, you want to automatically delete that as spam or whatever. You can do all of that stuff in the discussion settings. Then in the media area, I keep that setting panel pretty much default as well. If you have different size images based on your theme, maybe you regularly want your images on your website to be 300 by 300, you can set that as what the medium size image size is. Or maybe it’s 900 by 900, whatever it is, you can change those image sizes. And so when Word Press automatically generates their images, which every time you upload an image to the media library, it actually creates four or five extra images.

And it’s like a little thumbnail version, a medium sized version, a large version. And so it does all of that in the background. But if you want to set those sizes to be something very, very particular, you can make those changes as well. And then I always check the organize date box, and I just do that just because of the fact that I really like all of my images to be in folders. And so I can kind of see where they go, and I can kind of recognize where the different things are. So if I know that I posted that in September of 2015, then I know I can go at least into that folder and find the image that I’m looking for.

Otherwise, it just puts them in one folder, and it just like fills up with tons and tons of images. And then the last thing in that section is the perma links. I always change mine to custom structure and do the post name. And then this just helps with search engine optimization. It really helps for pages. And those pages will have Your Website Engineer.com/contact. And that will be the contact page versus Your Website Engineer.com/P=?123 or whatever that really looks like. So those are kind of the settings that I go through when I install Word Press for the first time.

I just make sure that I go in and make these changes. I don’t really have a checklist. But I kind of work my way down the left hand side of the menu in the dashboard and just kind of working every section and just delete stuff from the posts, delete stuff from the pages, and get rid of that comment. And then just kind of move my way down and get rid of the extra themes, the extra plug-ins, all that kind of stuff. Just kind of do that. And like I said at the top of the section, if you are using desktop server, once you’ve done all of this stuff, you could save that as a blue print. And I’m pretty sure that it just does the theme type stuff.

But it might be possible. I’m not exactly sure if the database and stuff works on that. I’d have to give that a try. But I know if you remove plug-ins and add plug-ins and put things as default and save that as a blue print, they’ll use those files when they set up Word Press for the next time. So that’s what I wanted to share with you today. All right. That’s all I’ve got to share with you today. If you are interested in a webinar, go ahead and sign up for the webinar on how to restore a Word Press site from a back up. You can register at Your Website Engineer.com/webinar. That’s Your Website Engineer.com/webinar.

And there’s really no link on the website. I always forget to actually make a link to make it easier. And I should do that. So I should regularly do that so it’s easy to find. Anyway, go to Your Website Engineer.com/webinar to learn how to restore a site from back up. That’s all I’ve got for you this week. Take care.