The most important WordPress settings that you must make on your site

When it comes to managing your site on WordPress , the settings section comes as one of the basic things that every site owner should know. Through this section, you can customize multiple aspects that affect the functionality and appearance of the site. The “ General Settings ” section is an essential part of the dashboard sections. The content management system governs WordPress. This section aims to customize the site by specifying the basic information and general settings that affect the presentation of the site and its environment. Therefore, in this article, we will discuss the main options in the settings section of the WordPress control panel and we will explain how to use them effectively to improve security and performance. , and user experience.

First, you can access the settings section in the WordPress content management system control panel by going to the WordPress control panel and then going to the (Settings) tab:

General Settings

Let us begin by explaining the general settings that affect the operation of the site’s main settings, which must be set up correctly, as follows:

Site Name: This appears in the browser header and is used as the meta name for Syndication feeds in WordPress, so it must be clear and express the content of the site.
Site description: The short description of the site’s content. It may appear in search engine results and link snippets on social media, so it must be brief and express the site’s content.
WordPress Address: With this setting, enter the full URL of the directory containing the core WordPress application files.
Your website address: Through this setting, enter the full URL that visitors will use to reach your site.
Administration Email Address: Enter the email address you want WordPress to send messages to regarding the administration and maintenance of your WordPress site.
Membership: This setting allows you to decide whether or not you want to allow users to register on your site.
Default Role: This drop-down list allows you to select the default role that will be assigned to users.
Site language: Through this setting, you can specify the main language in which your site content will be displayed.

These are the basic settings that you must pay attention to when making general settings. After that, you will find the time formats that will affect the time that appears in the site’s control panel settings. It is good to choose them in accordance with the time zone in which you live.

After making the settings, click on the ( Save changes ) button.

Writing Settings

The “ Writing ” settings in WordPress enable you to customize your publishing and writing preferences. These settings affect the process of adding and editing posts, pages, and post types.

Default article classification: When you do not specify a category for a new article or delete a category associated with several articles, the default article classification of “ Uncategorized ” is automatically used, so it is recommended to change it to the broader classification on your site.
Default article format: These settings enable you to specify the default format for new articles. You can choose the format that suits the type of content you provide, whether it is text, images, videos, or podcasts. The default option is “ Standard ” and multiple formats are supported.

Then after that, you will find the settings for publishing via email if there is an integration with an email for publishing articles, but it is best for you in the beginning to publish from within the WordPress editor itself to better adjust the publishing settings.

By using the writing settings in WordPress, you can now coordinate the process of creating and publishing content accurately and accurately. These settings enable you to customize your experience in writing and managing articles in accordance with your needs and goals.

Reading Settings

This section allows you to select whether you want to display your latest posts or a “static” page as your website’s home page, as well as adjust the number of posts displayed on the home page.

Through the reading settings, you can specify the first page of your website. These settings determine whether your posts or the “static” page is displayed as the home page of your WordPress site if you have previously designed a page and want it to appear on the home page.

If you choose to show the latest articles, through the reading settings you will specify the articles displayed on the home page or the visible posts when downloading your site’s feeds , as well as specifying whether you want to display an article in the feed or include it (the excerpt only), and it is best to choose to include the excerpt.

In the end, you will find the option to cancel the indexing of your site in search engines , as this setting allows you to control the appearance of your site’s content to search engines. Do not select this option unless your site is under work and you do not want the site’s content to appear before it is fully developed.

Using Reading Settings in WordPress, you can now customize how content is displayed and formatted on your site. By choosing the appropriate settings according to your goals, you will be able to provide a satisfying and enjoyable user experience for your site visitors.

Discussion Settings

The Comment Settings section in WordPress is an essential part of your site’s comment settings if you allow visitors to add comments. Here’s a look at the options available in the comment settings.

1. Default settings for discussions, which are specific to individual articles.

Try to alert blogs linked to the article: WordPress can alert blogs linked to the article by sending ping notifications if they allow pingbacks and trackbacks .
Allow link notifications from other blogs: Enable WordPress to accept or reject ping notifications from other sites that point to your site.
Allow people to post comments on new articles: Select this option if you want to allow comments on your articles, or disable it to stop comments completely.

2. Advanced settings for comments:

For more precise control over discussion settings, you can look at the following set of options:

Commenter must include name and email: Select this option to help you build your email list and get in touch with users.
Visitors must register to comment: If this option is selected, only registered users will be able to write comments on your site.
Automatically turn off comments: If you want to turn off comments after a certain number of days have passed since the article has been published.
Show comments cookies: This setting saves users’ information in their browsers to enable them to leave comments more effectively in the future.
Allow nested comments: Through the drop-down menu, select the number of levels deep that allow nested comments.
Number of comments per page: You can specify how comments will be organized and displayed once they reach a certain size, and the chronological order in which they will appear.

You will then find the site administrator’s comment notification settings that enable you to have WordPress notify you when users submit new comments, as well as manually approve comments and require previous comments from the author.

Choose (manually approve comments) to limit spam comments.

Then, to manage comments effectively and limit spam, you can block specific words, set a maximum number of links in a comment, and block specific words from comments. If these words are an indication that a comment is bad, it will be automatically transferred to the review list or deleted.

Then finally, the avatar settings. It is best to leave the default settings as they are without modification:

Then click the ( Save ) button to save the changes you made.

Media Settings

WordPress media settings are an important part of the content management experience. These settings help you determine the allowed size of images, which directly affects your site’s performance and loading speed.

The most important thing to do in the media settings is the default image size, as the sizes listed below define the maximum dimensions in pixels to use when inserting an image into the body of the article:

Thumbnail: Enter the maximum width and maximum height of the thumbnail, and you can crop it to fit the specified dimensions by selecting the “ Crop Thumbnail ” option.
Medium Image: Enter the maximum width and maximum height of the medium image as per your requirement.
Large Image: Enter the maximum width and maximum height of the large image as per your requirement.

It is best to leave the default settings that WordPress provides you unchanged.

Permalink Settings

Permalink settings are one of the basic aspects of the WordPress content management system. These settings play an important role in improving user experience and improving search engine optimization, by creating links that are easy to read and understand, as the permalink is the permanent URL for your site, blog posts, pages, and categories. You can choose from 5 permalink structures as follows:

Normal: WordPress uses the post ID as a slug in the query string.
Day + Article Title: The link includes the year, month, and day, as well as the title tag of the article.
Month + Article Title: The link includes the year and month, as well as the title tag of the article.
Digital: Includes the article ID under the public archive link.
Article Title: Slog only uses the article title after the main domain name.

In addition to the previous five structures, you can set up a custom structure using 10 different variables if you want to use the custom structure when you need something specific that none of the other structures provide, and they are as follows:

%year% – the year of publication consisting of four digits.
%monthnum% – a two-digit month of publication.
%day% – the day of publication consisting of two digits.
%hour% – the publishing hour in 24-hour format with two digits.
%minute% – the minute of publication consisting of two digits.
%second% – the instantaneous second of publication, consisting of two digits.
%post_id% – This is the post ID from the WordPress database.
%postname% – This is the title of the article.
%category% – which is the slug for the entire category of “articles – categories”.
%author% – which is the slug of the author name from “Users – Profile”.

The “ article title ” structure is one of the most useful and most widely used of all permalink structures. When you create an article, WordPress adds the article title as part of the permalink, which makes it easier for visitors to your site to remember it, and it can also be easily analyzed by search engines.

You can also change the structure of the category and tag links. For example: If you write topics, the category links will become as follows: http://www.examples.com/valley4techs/topics/uncategorized/. If you do not want to change them, leave the fields blank.

Permalinks don’t have to be confusing. If they’re set up correctly, you’ll forget about them and won’t need to reconfigure them, so you must ensure that your site is fully navigable by users and search engines.

Privacy Settings

In the modern web world, privacy and protection issues are of utmost importance , so privacy settings in WordPress enable you to clarify how data is collected and used on your site, which contributes to strengthening trust between you and your site visitors.

Current versions of WordPress include a privacy tool under the “ Settings ” tab in the administrative control panel. This tool gives you a general privacy policy template to use, with instructions on how to add content to it.

Log in to WordPress as an administrator .
From the Settings tab , click Privacy .
You will notice that WordPress has automatically created a draft of the “ Privacy Policy ” page, you can click the “ Use this page ” button to save it as your privacy policy page if you need a simple privacy policy.
You can make any changes you want to this simple draft. Just click on “ Privacy Policy Guide ” to open the full outline of the privacy policy provided by WordPress. Then, search for the paragraph you want to add to understand the required content and its location on the page. After that, go to the “ Pages ” tab. Then open the “ Privacy Policy ” page to make the modifications you want.
You can also click the “ Create ” button to create a new privacy policy page. WordPress will automatically create a new page and open it for you to make the changes you want to it as we learned in the previous paragraph (don’t forget to remove the word “ Suggested Text ” from all paragraphs), then click the “Create” button. Publish ” to save your changes.

We conclude from the above that by adjusting your privacy settings in WordPress, you can achieve the perfect balance between providing a positive experience for visitors and adhering to privacy requirements.

With this, we have finished explaining WordPress settings so that we can help website owners explore and customize their site settings on WordPress safely and confidently. A precise understanding of this aspect of the platform enhances users’ ability to build a unique and superior website experience that exceeds the audience’s expectations and meets their needs effectively.