Managing Settings: General

Learn how to configure the WordPress General Settings to meet your site’s needs. This walkthrough will give you an understanding of the options in the General Settings tab and the basics of your website.

Learning outcomes

1. Personalize the General Settings of your WordPress website.

Comprehension questions

1. When should I adjust the URL settings?
2. What types of emails will I receive from WordPress?
3. Where do date and time show up in my posts?

Resources

• User Management Workshop

Transcript

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 address, and even the site language. Feel free to follow along with me and pause the video as you need so that you can personalise your own admin settings.

Let’s start from 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.

First, to general settings. On the top, you’ll see 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 gonna leave my name as My Food Blog, but I am going to change the tagline to Roxy’s Favorite Treats and Recipes. A pro tip here is to use descriptive names so that search engines can display your website properly. And now you can see that my site title and tagline are in the top left corner.

All right, 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 install and are rarely changed in this settings area. Honestly, 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, the only time you’ll probably use this is if you need to implement your SSL certificate.

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

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 default role is a subscriber so that new users have limited access to your dashboard. You can change this. However, I would recommend subscriber level, you can always update a user’s role after they’ve registered to give them more access and capabilities. To learn more about what all of the different user roles mean and what the different users can actually do, be sure to check out the workshop on Learn WordPress. I’ll include the link below this video.

I’m going to scroll down to the site language and select my preferred language from the drop down list. For me, I’m going to confirm that it’s English. And 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.

Okay, great onto timezone. Select the city for your preferred timezone. 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 on 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, 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 over to My Food Blog, you’ll see that that date format shows up under a post, but the end 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 make my selection, I’ll move on to the last segment, which is picking what day I want my calendar widget to start. You’ll see all of your options, but I’ll keep it on Sunday. And let’s add that calendar to see what it looks like. So I’m going to search under widgets, add the calendar, and you’ll see that the first day of the week is Sunday. If you want to change it so that the calendar starts on a different day of the week, head on back over to your settings. When I’m done, I’ll go ahead and save changes.

Great job personalizing those general settings for you and your site’s needs. Be sure to check out the rest of our setting workshops on learn.wordpress.org. See you there!