12 Things to Do After Installing WordPress (First Setup)

Habib ur Rehman10 hours ago

5 3 5 minutes read

Checklist of things to do after installing WordPress for the first time

You just installed WordPress. Congratulations, the hard part is over, right? Not quite. A fresh WordPress install comes with demo content, unsafe default settings, and zero protection. These are the things to do after installing WordPress that turn that blank installation into a secure, fast, professional website. Work through all twelve in order, and your site will be set up better than most blogs that have been running for years.

If you are still getting familiar with where everything is, keep our WordPress dashboard tour for beginners open in another tab. It shows exactly where each menu item below lives.

1. Change Your Site Title and Tagline

Every fresh install says “Just another WordPress site” as its tagline, which screams “I never finished setting this up.” Go to Settings, then General, and set a proper site title (your brand or blog name) and a short tagline that describes what the site is about in a few words.

While you are on the General settings page, set your timezone correctly and pick a sensible date and time format. If the timezone is wrong, your scheduled posts will publish at unexpected hours. For the full walkthrough with screenshots, see our guide on how to change your WordPress site title and tagline.

2. Fix Your Permalink Structure

Permalinks are the permanent URLs of your posts. The WordPress default looks like yourdomain.com/?p=123, which is ugly and tells Google nothing about your content. Go to Settings, then Permalinks, and select Post name. Your URLs will become clean and descriptive, like yourdomain.com/my-first-article.

Do this before you publish anything. Changing permalinks later breaks existing links and hurts any rankings you have already earned.

3. Delete the Default Content

WordPress ships with demo content that must go before launch:

The “Hello world!” post under Posts, then All Posts.
The “Sample Page” under Pages, then All Pages.
The default comment from “Mr WordPress” under Comments.

Move each to trash, then empty the trash. Leaving demo content live looks unprofessional, and Google can index it, which creates thin, useless pages on your brand-new site.

4. Install an SSL Certificate

SSL is what puts the padlock icon in browsers and changes your address from http:// to https://. Google treats HTTPS as a ranking signal, and visitors trust secure sites more. The good news: almost every decent host provides a free SSL certificate (usually from Let’s Encrypt) with one click in your hosting panel.

After activating it, make sure your WordPress Address and Site Address under Settings, then General both start with https://. If your host does not offer free SSL, that is a red flag about the host itself. Our web hosting comparison only lists providers that include free SSL on every plan.

5. Install Only the Essential Plugins

Resist the urge to install twenty plugins on day one. Start with a small, trusted set that covers the fundamentals:

Security: a login-protection and firewall plugin to block brute-force attacks.
Backups: an automated backup plugin that stores copies off your server.
SEO: an SEO plugin to control titles, meta descriptions, and sitemaps.
Caching: a caching plugin to make your pages load faster.
Forms: a contact form plugin so visitors can reach you.

Install each from Plugins, then Add New, checking that it has strong ratings and was updated recently. Every plugin you add is code running on your site, so fewer, well-chosen plugins beat a long list of random ones.

6. Set Up Automatic Backups

This is the step everyone skips until the day they need it. Configure your backup plugin to run automatically at least once a day and to store the backups somewhere other than your own server, like Google Drive or Dropbox. A backup that lives on the same server as your site is useless if the server itself fails.

Test the restore process once while everything is fine, so you know it works. A backup you have never tested is just a hope, not a plan.

7. Harden Your Login Security

WordPress login pages get attacked by automated bots constantly. Three quick wins make your site a much harder target:

Use a strong, unique password and never use “admin” as your username.
Limit how many times someone can guess your password before being locked out. Our guide on how to limit login attempts without a plugin shows the code method.
Keep WordPress core, your theme, and your plugins updated. Most hacked sites are hacked through old, unpatched software, not clever attacks.

8. Speed Up Your Site From Day One

Speed affects both your Google rankings and whether visitors stay or leave. Two foundational moves cost nothing:

Enable compression: GZIP compression shrinks your pages before they travel to visitors. Our tutorial on enabling GZIP without a plugin walks through the exact code.
Compress your images: photos straight from a camera are often ten times larger than they need to be for the web. Resize and compress every image before uploading.

Fast hosting matters too. If your host is slow, no plugin will fully fix it, which is why choosing well at the start pays off for years.

9. Connect Google Site Kit

Install Google’s free Site Kit plugin and connect it to Search Console and Analytics. Search Console tells you which keywords bring visitors and warns you about indexing problems. Analytics shows who visits and what they read. Setting this up on day one means you collect data from the very beginning instead of wishing later that you had.

10. Create Your Essential Pages

Before you announce your site to the world, create these pages under Pages, then Add New:

About: who you are and what the site is for. Builds trust instantly.
Contact: a simple form so readers and potential clients can reach you.
Privacy Policy: legally required in most places if you collect any data (and Analytics counts). Many SEO plugins can generate a starter draft.

Then go to Appearance, then Menus and add these pages to your main navigation menu so visitors can actually find them.

11. Configure Your Comment Settings

Decide early how you want comments to work. Go to Settings, then Discussion and make these choices: require comment authors to fill in name and email, hold every new comment for your approval before it appears, and disable comments on old posts automatically if you like. This keeps spam off your site while real conversations can still happen.

12. Publish Something Real and Submit to Google

Finally, write and publish your first genuine post or page, something that represents what the site is about. Then go to Google Search Console (which you connected in step 9), paste your homepage URL into the URL Inspection tool, and click “Request Indexing.” This asks Google to come crawl your site instead of waiting weeks for it to discover you on its own.

That is the complete foundation. From here, the work shifts from setup to the fun part: publishing helpful content regularly.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does the initial WordPress setup take?

Working steadily, all twelve steps take about two to three hours for a beginner. Most of that time goes into writing your About page and picking a theme. The technical steps themselves take minutes each.

Do I need to do all of this before publishing my first post?

Steps 1 through 8 are the important ones to finish first, because permalinks, SSL, and security are painful to fix later. Pages, menus, and polish can be refined during your first week of publishing.

Can I skip the backup step if my host says they back up my site?

No. Host backups are a nice safety net, but you cannot always access or restore them yourself, and some hosts charge for restores. Keep your own automated backups somewhere you control. It takes ten minutes to set up and can save your entire site one day.

Last updated: October 2026.