The First 5 Settings to Change After Installing WordPress
A fresh WordPress install is like a new office with the previous tenant’s name still on the door. It works, but it is not yours yet. Before you write a single page, spend five minutes on these five settings. They affect how your site appears in search results, how dates display, and whether spam floods your inbox. Do them now, while the site is new and there is nothing to break.
1. Site title and tagline
Go to Settings, then General. The Site Title is your business name as it appears in browser tabs and search results. The Tagline defaults to “Just another WordPress site,” which tells the world you never finished setting up. Replace it with a short description of what you do, or delete it if your theme does not display taglines. Click Save Changes.
2. Timezone
Still in Settings, General, find the Timezone dropdown. WordPress defaults to UTC, which means scheduled posts publish at the wrong local time and timestamps look odd. Set it to your actual timezone. While you are here, confirm the date and time formats look right, then save.
3. Permalinks
Go to Settings, then Permalinks. WordPress defaults to “Plain” URLs like yourbusiness.com/?p=123, which are ugly and unhelpful for search engines. Select “Post name” instead, so pages get readable addresses like yourbusiness.com/about-us. Click Save Changes. This is the single most impactful setting on this list for SEO, and it is much easier to set now than to change after you have published content.
4. Comment settings
Go to Settings, then Discussion. Decide whether you want comments at all. For most business websites, the answer is no on pages, and maybe on blog posts. Uncheck “Allow people to submit comments on new posts” if you do not want to moderate spam. If you keep comments on, require that comments be manually approved. An unmoderated comment section fills with spam within weeks, and it looks terrible.
5. Delete the sample content
WordPress ships with a sample post (“Hello world!”), a sample page, and a sample comment. Go to Posts and delete the Hello world post. Go to Pages and delete the Sample Page. Go to Comments and delete the sample comment. This takes thirty seconds and removes the telltale signs of an unfinished site. If search engines index your site before you finish building it, you do not want them indexing placeholder content.
What comes next
With these five done, your site has a proper name, correct time, clean URLs, sensible comment settings, and no placeholder content. The natural next steps: choose a theme that fits your brand, install only the plugins you actually need (see How to Choose Plugins Without Slowing Your Site), and start building your pages. If you installed WordPress but have not secured the connection yet, our Protect pillar covers SSL.
Two more quick wins while you are here
Delete unused themes. WordPress ships with several default themes, and most sites only ever use one. Go to Appearance, then Themes, and delete the ones you will not use. Unused themes are dead code sitting on your server, and dead code can have vulnerabilities. Keep your active theme and one default as a fallback.
Confirm your admin email. WordPress occasionally asks you to verify the administration email address. When it does, confirm it promptly. This address receives security notices and password reset requests, so it must be one you actually monitor. If it goes to an inbox nobody checks, you will miss warnings that matter.
Still stuck? Open a support ticket and tell us which setting is giving you trouble. We will walk you through it.