There are several settings I’ve been guilty of overlooking in the past when launching new websites. I want to share these settings with you so you can add them to your site launch checklist.
In this article:
- The Settings
- General
- Tagline
- Timezone
- Administration Email Address
- Reading
- Search Engine Visibility
- Permalinks
- Permalink Structure
- Privacy
The Settings
Before I dive into some of my most commonly missed settings, it’s important to mention that checking the settings should be on every site launch checklist. It saves a lot of issues and hassles later on.
General
These are settings found under the General subtab of the Settings dashboard tab.
Tagline
It’s hard to think of anything worse than finishing up a site, then sharing it on social media… just to find under the title it says, “Just another WordPress site”.
Timezone
By default, every WordPress installation has it’s timezone set to UTC+0. However, chances are your website isn’t based within the timezone of UTC+0. To have everything in WordPress display your correct local time to you, set this to your closest region. If you pick a city rather than a UTC value, daylight savings will also be automatically accounted for.
Administration Email Address
The administration email address is another one of those settings that can be easy to miss. Do you have the correct contact entered who you want to have potentially receive sensitive emails with user registrations, password resets, etc.? It’s always a good idea to double check this field.
Reading
These are settings found under the Reading subtab of the Settings dashboard tab.
Search Engine Visibility
The search engine visibility may be the most important setting to check. You don’t want to leave the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox enabled after you launch a website. Ensure this is the value you actually want it to be.
Permalinks
Permalink Structure
Permalink Structure is another important setting to check. Though it’s good to consider the SEO implications of each permalink structure, that’s not my point. My point is just to double-check to ensure selected permalink structure is actually the permalink structure you want to use moving into the future. It’s a lot better to change this setting early on or pre-launch than later down the road. It can be extremely destructive to SEO to change the permalink structure later on.
Privacy
My focus for privacy settings isn’t so much on the settings portion of it. I just want to encourage the use of privacy policies. With an increasing amount of privacy laws around the globe, it’s important to protect yourself. There are services such as Termageddon and Iubenda that can help you create policies at a fraction of having a lawyer write them from scratch. This is not legal advice, just some food for thought.
In Conclusion
I hope this guide has been helpful in identifying some of the most commonly overlooked settings in WordPress.
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