New website setup checklist & guide with WordPress

So here we go with setting up a new WordPress website – remember all the steps?

It’s like you need a checklist of sorts to remember which parts are critical, which are not.

Use this quick guide to go over common items and settings to change when setting up your new WordPress website.

Some may be obvious, some may be routine, much you may already know, but whether you are a beginner or a pro, we still need a checklist for WordPress websites.

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Let’s go.

Outline

We’ll be looking at:

1. WordPress settings
2. Plugins
   1. Favicon Generator
3. Themes
4. Web pages

Settings

Change your permalinks … now!

Yes, get rid of the f-ugly URLs

First in the media library

Then in the Permalink Options

Take it a steps further if you plan on blogging and adjust so that all blog postings will have the ‘/blog/’ in the permalink.

This is OG-SEO old school SEO strategy of having pages and postings ‘siloed’

Custom Post Type Permalinks

If working with custom post types with something like ‘Advanced Custom Fields’ or ‘ACF’, review the ‘Advanced Settings’ to have a clean URL.

If you leave it checked, you will have a URL that defaults to:

www.you-domain.com/blog/custom-post-type

Same should apply to your custom taxonomies

Tip – Custom post type URLs

When setting up custom post types, pay attention to URLs (Permalinks) for post types and taxonomies.

The following should be reviewed:

1. URL for post type
2. URL for taxonomy/category (tags as well if you plan to use them)
3. Front page (archive page) for custom post type

WordPress Plugins

Here we go … plugins can be a bit much – which one to use, is it updated, does it work and more.

The more plugins you add, the more load it adds to the website – use sparingly and with caution.

Here is our quick list of plugins with setting up a new WordPress website

Favicons

This one is great for generating the various favicons for your website

https://wordpress.org/plugins/favicon-by-realfavicongenerator/

“Generate and setup a favicon for desktop browsers, iPhone/iPad, Android devices, Windows 8 tablets and more.”