28 Things to do after installing wordpress

Installing wordpress is doestn’t mean that you can start writing your posts. Ofcourse you can write but if you could able to do some tweaks and install plugins that makes your wordpress blog more powerful. Generally things are in our mind  and there are chances that we may miss some. So here I am giving a list of things ( no particular order ) helps you make your blog completely ready for writing articles. Lets start

#1.  Change your ‘Admin’ user name : By default ‘admin’ is your user name of your wordpress login.  If some one want to login into your account they will keep username as ‘admin’ and by using bruteforce approach they can easily get your password.By changing your user name from ‘admin’ add security to your blog. For this create a new user with admin privileges and delete the present. If you have already written some posts dont wont wordpress provides an option to re-assign to new user.

#2.  Change your Display name

#3.  Change structure of permalink’s for better SEO as shown in the below figure.

#4.  Delete default Hello World post and Sample Page Page

#5.  Once Check with  Blog Title and Blog tagline [ Settings-> General ]

#6.  Check your mail ID associated with your blog.  [ Settings-> General ] , this helps to restore your password if  you forgot.

#7. You can Turn off post revisions if you dont want by adding below line to wordpress.config file

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

#8. Strip of wordpress version number from your code. Check for following part of code in your code and remove it.

[/css]

(or)

<!--?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?-->

#9. Update Ping list. For convenience I created a ping list for blogs in a text file.

#10.Create custom 404 Page

Theme and Logo

#10. If you are planning huge start with blog with powerful themes like Genesis & Thesis. I prefer Genesis over Thesis. If you want to start simple I recommend to start with TwentyTen theme or Twenty Eleven by creating a child theme. If you are poor at coding and can’t buy Genesis or Thesis use Swift themes.

#11.  Customize your blog.

#12.  Design a cool logo which matches your blog

#13. Create a account at Feedburner and redirect your feed URL.

#14. Add Google Analytics Tracking Code.

Plugins

#13. Configure Akismet plugin

#14. Install WordPress SEO by Yoast or All in one SEO pack. I recommend WordPress SEO by Yoast and configure it

#15.  If you are using All in one SEO pack then Install Google XML Sitemaps

#16.  Install Subscribe to Comments, helps your visitors to subscribe to your comments.

#17.  Install Contact Form 7, helps your visitors to contact you.

#18.  Install WordPress Super Cache or Total Cache which speeds and reduces your bandwidth.

#19.  Install Wp-DB Manager Plugin which helps you to back-up your blog completely.

Optional Plugins

#20.  For social networking, if you are unable to tweak code you can use  socialize plugins like Share bar, Add This, Share This.

#21.  WP-Page Navi for Pagination.

#22.  Wp-Smush.it for optimizing images

#23. You can add YARPP Plugin once you wrote 20-30 posts in your blog

#24. Add Privacy policy & Disclaimer ( If your blog serves Google ads, Privacy policy is must )

#25. Add your site to Google, Bing, Yahoo

#26.  Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools.

#27. Do section targeting ( if you are using Google Adsense )

#28. Now start writing your content

These are all general things you have to do after installing wordpress.  Actually I keep this list in notepad as a check list when creating a blog for clients or friends. Hope this useful.