Configure WordPress Settings for Writers Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of WordPress settings for Writers.

Writing Settings

The Writing Settings control WordPress’s features in the adding and editing of posts and pages. They also control optional functions like Remote Publishing, Post via email, and Update Services.

Default Post Category

You select the default post category from the Default Post Category drop-down. The default post Category is automatically assigned to a post if you fail to assign any other Categories. This setting can be changed at any time so if you find you use a specific category more than another you can select that category here to be the default. 

In an earlier lesson I edited the default ‘Uncategorised’ category to News which is now the default. So I’m going to leave that as it is.

Default Post Format

Lets look at the Default Post Format. WordPress has 10 different post formats which you can see when I click on the drop down box. It’s outside the scope of this course to cover what each one does but in my experience every web site I’ve ever built uses the standard post format. I’ll stick with that here.

Post via Email

Don’t use Post via email to publish posts using an email client. It’s an awkward experience, never turns out the way you want it to, and can cause security headaches.

Update Services

Update services are ONE way for your site to alert search engines you have added new content. Depending on who you talk to, Update Services range from a valuable source of traffic to an outdated technology that doesn’t work anymore. 

I’m in the camp that anything that raises your profile with search engines in a non-spammy way is worth pursuing.

Of course there’s also a debate about which list of update services is most effective but I recommend starting with the official Update Service list from WordPress. 

I’ll copy the list from the WordPress page and paste into the update services file then save the changes I’ve made to the Writing Settings.

Reading Settings

The Reading Settings reflect WordPress’s evolution from a blogging platform to a fully featured content management system (CMS). 

Your homepage displays

Starting with ‘Your Homepage Displays’ we can choose if we want WordPress to act as a dedicated blogging platform where the home page displays the latest posts or if we want to set a static homepage and place our blog posts elsewhere.

Earlier we published the pages we need here. We’ll set those as our home page and posts page.

Blog pages show at most / Syndication feeds

In the next two settings we decide how many blog posts, per page, WordPress will display on the blog page. The syndication settings show the number of posts people will see when they download one of your site’s RSS feeds.

I’m going to set BOTH of these to 20, the recommended amount for search engine optimization.

For each post in a feed, include

For each post in a feed we’re going to set it to Excerpt only. We want visitors to come to the site rather than give all the site content away to bots and crawlers.

Search engine visibility

The search engine visibility options ASKS search engines not to index the website. I recommend ticking this box while building the website BUT don’t forget to untick when the site is done for maximum exposure.

Click save to activate these new settings.

Discussion Settings

Let move on to Discussion Settings

Open comments on a WordPress website cause two major problems.

The first is that managing comments generated by bots, hackers and fraudsters becomes a major time suck. 

The second is a website with empty comments sections just looks sad. It will kill your enthusiasm as you establish your online author platform.

For these reasons I don’t recommend activating comments so lets turn them off and configure the rest of the settings.

Default post settings

• We do want to ‘Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the post’ so I’ll tick that but I’ll untick the rest of the options in this section

Other Comment Settings

Tick all the options in the ‘OTHER COMMENTS’ section except for breaking comments into pages.

Email Me Whenever

There should never be a comment posted on this website but I’ll leave the default ticks in both options in the ‘Email me whenever’ section just in case. It’s overkill but worth having especially if there is more than one person managing the website.

Before a comment appears

That’s the same thought process behind ticking ALL the boxes in the ‘Before a Comment appears’ section. It’s a belt and braces approach to STOP comments getting added to your starter author website.

Comment Moderation / Disallowed Comment Keys

There are no changes to be made to the Comment Moderation or Disallowed Comment Keys

Avatars

No comments on this website means no need for Avatars so I’ll untick that which removes all the options below. No Avatars on the site also removes external calls to Gravatar and other Avatar services that add extra load time to the author’s website pages.

Now that we have cleaned up all the discussion settings I’ll save and move onto media settings.

Media Settings

We don’t need to make any changes to Media settings so we’ll move straight onto Permalinks.

Permalink Settings

The URL to each of the pages and posts on your author website should be permanent and never change which is why we have the term Permalink. 

By default, WordPress uses web URLs that have day and name in them so if I used the default settings and shared a link to a book on the Dirk Volcano site it would look like

• dirkvolcano.com/2024/05/05/adventure-danger

This is overly long, clunky to say, and looks awful.

However, when we change our permalink structure to Post name it becomes much clearer

• dirkvolcano.com/adventure-danger

That’s a lot easier to share on podcasts, interviews, social posts and ads.

Optional

I’m not going to make any changes to the optional fields below so I can go ahead and save the Permalink settings before we go to the last screen in settings.

Privacy Settings

In this settings screen we have the choice to create a new privacy page or use an existing page on our website for this link to point to. We already published the default Privacy Policy page in an earlier lesson so I’ll click the USE THIS PAGE button to point to the correct location.

We will still need to add links to this page starting with the footer in a later lesson.

Summary

And that’s it. We have configured all our WordPress settings.

We’ve spent extra time on WordPress settings but configuring those now will help to secure your website, make it load faster for visitors, and reduce admin time.

In the next lesson we are going to configure an SMTP plugin to make sure all the website emails are sent correctly.