Do These 3 Simple Tweaks to Your WordPress Site

You’ve just installed your new WordPress site and now you want to know what to do next. Well, if you purchased one of our themes, you’ll be able to follow our very detailed documentation on how to get your site to look like the demo.

Aside from that there are a few little things with WordPress fresh install that you’ll want to change immediately.

1. Change the URL Structure of your Site

Ok, you’re working through your site checklist and creating great articles for your customers to read, but when you look at the post online you see numbers at the end like this:

WordPress uses a permalink structure which shows the post ID number instead of a friendly title.

Don’t worry, you can change this quickly with just a few clicks. Go to Settings–>Permalinks and choose a different structure. A popular structure you can use is the one with your post name in the URL like:

http://example.com/post-name

Save your changes and now all your posts will show the descriptive URL structure rather than the unhelpful numbers.

2. Create a Custom Homepage in WordPress

By default a WordPress site is setup to show the latest blog posts on your homepage. And while that’s ok, you really want to setup a site that is more focused around your business. Say you have a lawn care business or a salon and you want to show a specific homepage, services, about, and contact pages.

Setting up your custom homepage is pretty easy.

First you want to create a page that will be your homepage. From your admin area go to Pages–>Add New and name your page. You can fill in the details later. Click publish to finish.

Now go to Settings–>Reading and under the Front page display area, choose A static page radio and pick your homepage from the frontpage dropdown.  You can choose another page for the blog posts or just leave that dropdown alone if you aren’t setting up a blog page. Click save changes.

Now you can go to your site to review the changes you’ve made to it.

3. Add Categories to Your Site

While you create all the articles you want to share on your site, you’ll notice that you can group several of them together into similar topics. These topics can be placed in categories on your website and it’ll help organize your site’s structure as well as help with search engine optimization.

For example, you’re getting your accounting website setup and you want to talk about small business tax questions, tax returns, and deductions. You can create these three different categories by going to Posts–>Category from your admin dashboard. Create the three categories and save your changes.

Note: You’ll see a category there called “uncategorized”. You can’t delete it, but you can edit it to one of your category names that you want to use. I’d recommend using your most popular category since all new posts are initially tied to the default category for all your posts unless you change it. When you write your articles, you’ll be able to choose from the list of categories for your blog posts.

I hope this article helped you learn 3 tweaks you can use to customize your site immediately to make it to look how you want in WordPress.

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