Managing Settings: General

Transcript

Introduction

It’s time to make your WordPress settings personalized to you and your site’s needs. In this workshop, we’re going to configure the general settings of your WordPress website, from blog titles to email addresses and even the site language. Let’s start with the WordPress dashboard. I’m going to head over to settings on the left side. You’re going to see the following options when you hover. General, Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, Permalinks, and Privacy. We’ll cover all of these in separate workshops.

Site title and tagline

First, to general settings. On the top, you’ll see the site title and tagline. You might have already set these up when you installed WordPress, but if you didn’t or you want to rename them, this is where you can do that. I’m going to leave my name as My Food Blog, but I am going to change the tagline to “Roxie’s Favorite Treats and Recipes.” A pro tip here is to use descriptive names so search engines can properly display your website. Now, you can see that my site title and tagline are in the top left corner.

URL settings

Alright, let’s move on to URL settings. This one is super important. The URL settings for your website, whether WordPress or site address, should be set up automatically with your installation and rarely change in this settings area. Changing the URL settings here can make your site inaccessible from the front or back end, and it would require access to the database to recover or repair these items. As a beginning user, you’ll probably use this only if you need to implement your SSL certificate.

Email address

Okay, so on to email address. You can change your email here to a different address than when you set up WordPress. You’ll get all admin and password reset emails to this address, so just make sure it’s valid.

Membership

Next, we’ll move on to Membership. With WordPress, you have the option to allow anyone to register for your site. If you select this option, you’ll see that the new user’s default role is Subscriber, so new users have limited access to your dashboard. You can change this; however, I recommend the subscriber level. After registering, you can always update a user’s role to give them more access and capabilities.

Site language

I will scroll down to the Site Language and select my preferred language from the drop-down list. I’m going to confirm that it’s English. It’s really important to make sure that your language is selected because it’ll help browsers and translation systems detect the website’s preferred language.

Time zone and date format

Okay, great. On to time zone. Select the city for your preferred time zone, or you could select the offset from Coordinated Universal Time, whichever one’s easier for you. You’ll see I went ahead and selected New York. Now, I’m going to go down to the date format. This date format will show on the front end of your website with any post metadata, like the author, date, and time, that’s with a new blog post. Now I can do the same thing for my time format, and I can even select different options and check them out in the preview. So, if we head to my food blog, you’ll see that that date format shows up under a post, but the date and time show up under a comment. So, with that in mind, make sure that you pick a format that looks good with your theme. Once I select, I’ll move on to the last segment, picking what day I want my calendar widget to start. You’ll see all your options, but I’ll keep it on Sunday. When I’m done, I’ll go ahead and save the changes.

Conclusion

Great job personalizing those general settings for you and your site’s needs.

Practical

Use WordPress Playground to test your knowledge.

1. Update the site title and tagline.
2. Change the site language to your preferred language if it is not English.
3. Choose either a city in the same timezone as you or a UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) time offset.
4. Set your preferred date format.