Ten Things to do after installing WordPress

Instal­la­tion of Word­Press is quick and sim­ple for many which is included by most host­ing providers. Once installed the real work begins. Here are 10 things you should do after installing word­press blog. If you are a client of ours you are in luck as we do all this stuff as stan­dard prac­tice and a bit more.

1. Reg­is­tra­tion : Reg­is­ter at wordpress.com to get an API key required to acti­vate Anti-spam comment’s plu­gin Akismet.
2. Change struc­ture of perma­links : By default, word­press perma­link set­ting is some­thing like ../?p=123blahblahblah. It is rec­om­mended to have search engine friendly URL struc­ture, change this to /% post­name%. This will give you pretty urls like yourdomain.com/portfolio. The options are avail­able under set­tings menu of your Word­Press dashboard.
3. Imple­ment sys­tem cache : Improve per­for­mance of your blog by installing a cache plu­gin. It increases the response speed and min­i­mizes server load. There are a few to choose from, per­son­ally I use Wp-cache. I rec­om­mend turn­ing this off when you are devel­op­ing your site, it will con­fuse the hell out of you when you are won­der­ing why not­ing you do appears to be updating.
4. Cre­ate Sitemap : This is essen­tial, your Sitemap is some­thing which helps Search engines to crawl your site con­tent more eas­ily. It can be cre­ated by sim­ply installing the Google XML site map plugin.
5. Change Feed direc­tion to feed­burner : Install Feed­Smith plu­gin to do this.
6. Add track­ing code : Track the per­for­mance of your site. Add google ana­lyt­ics, Stat­counter or some other one. Per­son­ally I use Google, but I have also heard that Stat­counter is reliable.
7. Add your site on Web­mas­ters’ tools :  Google Web­mas­ters’ tools has all func­tions that lets you upload your sitemap for fast index­ing and gives search sta­tis­tics and errors related to your site.
8. Cre­ate robots.txt : Using Google Web­mas­ters tool you can ana­lyze if you already have one or you it can gen­er­ate one for you.
9. Design : First impres­sions count, make sure your blog looks it’s best with a clear nav­i­ga­tion struc­ture. There are loads of great themes out there and loads of rub­bish ones too, look beyond the looks of a theme and do a bit of research before com­mit­ting your­self, you may regret it later.
10. Start Con­tent post­ing : Tell the world what you are going to write about and intro­duce your­self. Add a con­tact page with Wp-contact form plu­gin or my one of my favourites Cform­sII. Remem­ber to cre­ate an about page for vis­i­tors to find out more about you.

There are a ton of other things that you could also do, but this list should be the essen­tials cov­ered. Good luck!