Clean up WordPress posts, categories, tags and pages

Introduction

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.  

Only using what we need helps harden against site hackers and keeps the site’s footprint as light as possible for the fastest page loading times. Establishing this minimalist footprint from the start will pay dividends for the lifetime of the site.

Over the next few lessons we are going to strip away everything we don’t need in a default WordPress install starting with 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

On a side note you can sign up for the free Ultimate Web Hosting for Authors mini-course if you’d like to see how I set  up my web hosting.

But let’s get back to this course.

The WordPress dashboard is made up of the following sections.

• The Top Toolbar
• The Navigation Sidebar
• The Main Work Area
• And 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. Then we will remove unwanted posts, change the default post category, and publish the pages we need for this course.

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 to make it as easy as possible for us to draft new content. It’s all a bit much.
• I’m going to calm it down by going to screen options and deselecting everything but ‘Site Health Status’
• Now we 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 sample post. We don’t need these posts so I’ll delete this and empty the trash 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. 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. 

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There’s more information on why that’s a good idea on the Author Website Masterclass.

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 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 Essential Pages

We will go into detail on the privacy policy page later but for now we are going to publish the default page as it is.

Next we want to add and publish three new pages without content that we need for later lessons

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.
• Next I create another new page called BLOG and publish.
• Finally I create and publish a page called STYLE GUIDE.

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.