Every web hosting company I know offers a one click WordPress install but these usually come with preinstalled Themes and plugins which add weight and complexity to an author website.
The secret to a fast, secure WordPress website is only use what you need and keep what you use updated. By only keeping what we need we help harden the site from hackers and keep the site’s footprint as light as possible for the fastest page loading times. Establishing this base now will pay dividends for the lifetime of the site.
Over the next few lessons we are going to strip away everything you don’t need in a default WordPress install starting with the posts, categories, tags, and pages.
LOG IN TO WP ADMIN
After installing WordPress with your Web Host log into the WordPress administration dashboard using the admin username and password you configured when you set up the site. The admin login url is usually yourdomainname/wp-admin
Two quick notes.
- When you install WordPress with your chosen host do not use ‘admin’ as the username for your admin account on your site. It’s one of the first usernames a hacker will try so why make life easy for them?
- Use a password with at least 16 characters made up of mixed case, numbers and special characters. Both Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari have top quality password managers or there are dedicated programs including Proton Pass for a small fee every month.
A TOUR OF THE WORDPRESS DASHBOARD
After logging in you’ll see the WordPress dashboard.
The WordPress dashboard is made up of the following sections.
- The Top Toolbar
- The Main Navigation Sidebar
- The Work Area
- The Footer
I’ll cover these sections as I use them in the lessons.
We’ll start by removing all the widgets we don’t need from the WordPress dashboard, before removing unwanted posts, changing the default post category, and publishing three pages we need for this phase of the setup.
REMOVE DASHBOARD WIDGETS
- WordPress wants to be helpful but this can be distracting when we login to the main dashboard. The dashboard widgets want to tell us about what’s happening in the world of WordPress, about site activity and make it as easy as possible for us to draft new content. It’s all a bit much.
- I’m going to quieten it down by going to screen options and deselecting everything but ‘Site Health Status’
- We now have a much less distracting welcome dashboard that’s only populated by the health of the website.
REMOVE POSTS
Working our way down the Navigation sidebar on the left I click on posts to see what has been included with the WordPress install.
By default most WordPress installations include at least one post. We don’t need these default posts so I’ll delete this ‘Hello World’ post and empty the trash as well to make sure it is completely gone.
CATEGORIES AND TAGS
Default WordPress installs come with a single category, called Uncategorized.
I’m going to edit that and change it to ‘News’. We’ll also change the Slug.
The Slug is the URL friendly version of the name that appears in the weblink. If I wanted to share all the news items on Dirk’s site I’d send the link dirkvolcano.com/news
WordPress wants slugs in lower case and no spaces. We’re not going to have a parent category but I am going to add in a description which is best practice for SEO.
Stay updated on Dirk Volcano: news on his latest books, adventures, and appearances. From SEAL to author, Dirk’s life is a thrilling read!
There’s more information on why that’s a good idea on the ‘SEO for Authors’ online course linked below.
I’ll click update before moving on to tags.
TAGS
There are usually no tags set up in a default WordPress install. I don’t tend to use TAGS much as they are not indexed by Google. That’s not to say tags aren’t useful but I prefer to use categories, which are indexed by search engines.
I’ll leave this blank.
We will come back to categories and tags in later modules when we look at setting up custom post types to publish our books.
REMOVE PAGES
Next on the Navigation sidebar I click on pages to see what has been included with the WordPress install.
WordPress installations include at least one example page. Here we have a sample page and a draft privacy policy page.
We don’t need the sample page so I’ll delete it and empty the trash to make sure it’s completely gone.
PUBLISH PRIVACY PAGE AND ADD TWO MORE
We will go into detail on the privacy page later but for now we are going to publish the default page as it is.
Next we want to add two new pages. We are not going to add any content in these pages but we do need them to be created and published before we get to the WordPress settings lesson later in this module.
Back on the navigation bar on the left I select pages and add new pages.
I create the first page, name it HOME and publish.
I’ll create another new page and call it BLOG.
SUMMARY
That’s all we need to do to clean up our WordPress posts, categories, tags and pages. Let me know in the group if you have any questions about what we’ve covered so far or about keeping WordPress as lean as possible. See you in the next lesson.
