Managing Settings: Reading


Learn how to configure the WordPress Reading Settings to improve the presentation of posts and pages. This walkthrough will give you an opportunity to personalize your site’s front page, post feeds, and more!

This workshop is based on the lesson plan, Settings.

Learning outcomes

  1. Personalize the Reading Settings of your WordPress website.

Comprehension questions

  1. Do you prefer your front page to be set as a static page or feed of blog posts?
  2. How many blog posts do you want to show in your feed?
  3. Will showing the full text of the post or an excerpt be a better fit for your site?
  4. When should you check the button for search engine visibility?

Transcript

Are you looking to adjust how Posts and Pages appear on your site? Well, let’s head on over to reading settings. By the end of this short workshop, you’ll be able to personalize your own reading settings. I’ll be making changes on my food blog, but feel free to follow along on your own site.

On your left navigation bar, hover over settings and then click on reading. Here’s where you can select what you want on your site’s front page. You can choose from a feed of most recent blog posts, or an existing static page. I’m going to select a static page, go to my drop down under homepage. And you’ll see here that I have “Welcome to my food blog.” So I’m going to select that. And now if I go to my homepage, you’ll see that Welcome to my food blog is the new front page of my website.

If I did leave it as a blog post feed, I can limit the number of posts that would show on that page, as well as limit the number that will feed into the RSS for my blog. The default for each is 10. And I’m going to go ahead and switch them to five since I don’t update my food blog too often.

I can also specify whether the feed will include a summary or the full content of the post. I’m gonna switch this over to summary or excerpt which will show any catchy excerpt that I write in the meta box when I created my post. If we head over to my food blog now you’ll see it’s a feed of my most recent blog posts with excerpts and featured images.

And for search engine visibility, I’d recommend checking this box only if your website is in the development phase. It’ll minimize the chances of it being picked up. But don’t forget to uncheck it when your site goes into production. And that’s all there is to it to personalizing your reading settings.

Be sure to check out our other workshops on how to personalize your settings at learn.wordpress.org. See you there!

Workshop Details



Presenters

Roxy Kohilakis
@rkohilakis

I’m an instructional designer and audiologist. I’m sponsored by Automattic to contribute to the WordPress open-source project and Training Team.