Configure WordPress Settings for Writers Part 1

Introduction

There are hundreds of settings to configure WordPress exactly how you would like it. Left at their defaults, WordPress settings may give you extra workload, unpleasant surprises or even worse some unwelcome visitors.

In this lesson I’ll go through all the settings needed to configure a secure, low maintenance author website.

WordPress works best when configured from the ground up for a specific purpose. The purpose of an author website is to build mailing lists and promote books and these settings reflect that.

General Settings

We’ll start with General settings where we will configure the identity of the website for the rest of the world.

Site Title

The first setting you will see is Site Title. The Site Title is displayed in the title bar of a web browser and is displayed in the header for most themes.

Site title can be anything you’d like to describe your site but I recommend making it your author name. I’ll change this to Dirk Volcano which you can see is reflected up in the top bar.

Changing the site title DOES NOT change the site address or your domain.

Site Tagline

The site tagline is a short description or catchy phrase to describe what your site is about. Some themes will display the tagline in the header or in the sidebar. The tagline may also appear in search engine results pages.

I’ll add the tagline Author of the Dylan Danger and Village Detective Novels.

WordPress and Site Addresses

Your WordPress Address is the address where your WordPress files and folders are stored including your admin pages, media files, plugins, themes, and more. Your Site Address (the URL) is the public facing part of your website.

At this point I’m going to briefly talk about SSL Certificates.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the technology behind establishing an encrypted connection between a web server (the host) and a web browser (the visitor). This connection between the two makes sure that all the data passed between them remains private. 

It is vital to have a working SSL certificate for your site otherwise web browsers will STOP the visitor with a warning the site is not secure and ask the user if they are SURE they want to proceed. Not having a working SSL certificate will kill your web traffic.

You can get a FREE Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate from most good web hosts. Some web hosts will push you to buy a commercial SSL certificate but you don’t need one. The free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt is all you need.

If you’re not sure if you have an active SSL certificate from your web host contact their support team but insist on a Let’s Encrypt certificate. Do not let them upsell you.

After you’ve made sure you have an active SSL certificate, come back to the WordPress and Site Address fields. I’m going to update both these addresses to the secure HTTPS version that will check all traffic against the valid SSL certificate.

I’m going to SAVE CHANGES.

Because we’ve set the WordPress and Site Address fields to the HTTPS version the site has logged us out and wants us to log back in again.

Administration Email Address

Once I’m logged back in it’s back to the general settings area and the administration address.

The administration email address is usually the address you used to set up the WordPress install. This is where your WordPress install will send admin messages and notifications. I strongly recommend making this an email address you access regularly and make sure the sending address is on the allow list of your email client. I’ll cover the best way to set up sending email services from your WordPress site in a later lesson.

For now we just need to make sure this is the address we want WordPress to contact.

Membership

Leave the Membership box unchecked. We do NOT want our core website to be a membership site as well. That’s best done with a separate dedicated WordPress install or 3rd party service.

New User Default Role

One of the ways to keep tight security on a WordPress site is to carefully manage users. Only add who you need with the minimum permissions and only for the time they need to be there. If you have a PA managing your posts only give them ‘Author’ or ‘Editor’ access.

Some theme or plugin support groups may need admin access to resolve an issue for you. Give them a dedicated account then demote and delete it as soon as they are done!

We help keep user security TIGHT on our starter author website by making the default role for new users ‘Subscriber’ only. Any elevation of roles within your author website must be approved by you as the admin.

Site Language

The Site Language option lets us select the language for the dashboard for some of the theme text shown to visitors. Changing this setting will not automatically translate your CONTENT from one language to another.

It is possible to host multilingual websites but that’s outside the scope of this course.

As Dirk Volcano is an American author living in the USA with a large international English speaking audience I’ll set this as English United States.

Timezone

The website’s timezone is set to Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, by default, which is in London, in the UNited Kingdom.

Set the website timezone to the nearest city location to you. Doing this saves you a lot of headaches trying to figure out what time you were sent notifications or contact messages from the website. I’ll set this to Chicago which is the nearest city to fictional Dirk’s fictional farm home.

Date Format

The date format is the format in which to display dates on your site. Set the date format to match your preference. I like the UK day/month/Year format but as Dirk is an American author I’ll set it to the more appropriate month/day/Year format for the region.

Time Format

The time format is the format in which to display times on your site. Dirk, like me, prefers the 24 clock format of Hour and Minutes separated by a colon (H:i). You can read more about custom date and time formats over on the main WordPress website.

Week Starts On

Select your preferred start date for WordPress calendars from the drop-down box. Monday is the default setting for this drop-down, meaning a monthly calendar will show Monday in the first column. If you want your calendar to show a different day as the first column, then select that day from the drop down box.

I’m happy with those changes to General Settings.

This is already a long lesson so I’ll finish here and pick up the rest of the settings in the next video with the Writing Settings.