About the WordPress “Settings” Section

This is a post intended for clients of ClickNathan.com. While you may find the information below useful, as it generally applies to WordPress, there may be information involving customized aspects of WordPress that aren’t out-of-the-box features. It was written for WordPress v. 3.3.1.

Out of the box WordPress has some basic settings which can be configured. I won’t go into every minute detail about every possible setting, but I’ll cover some of the major ones here, one screen at a time.

General Settings

This can be found under Settings > General and the following fields apply to most of my clients:

  • Site Title This will typically not change anything on your website itself, as you’ll likely have your logo displayed instead of plain text for your site, but it will affect the Title tag and therefore has SEO implications.
  • Tagline If your site uses a tagline prominently in the header area, typically near your logo, you can often change it here.
  • WordPress Address & Site Address. These should NEVER be changed. You will break your site!
  • E-mail address. You can change this if you’d like. New user registrations, new comment notifications and other general emails that WordPress uses will be sent here.
  • Membership Checking this box will allow anyone who can get to your registration form to sign up. Whatever I have it set as is likely the best thing to leave it at.
  • New User Default Role should always be Subscriber, unless I have this set as something else.  This should NEVER be changed. You could give users access to parts of your administrative area you don’t want them in!
  • Nothing else on this page is applicable to my clients.

Writing

Feel free to read through and adjust these settings as works best for your writing style.

Reading

  Nothing on this page should ever be changed. You will break your site’s layout!

Discussion

Only applicable if your site includes blogging capabilities (ie, you have the Posts navigation item and your contract specifically states that you will have the ability to manage a blog). If you do, these are the applicable settings for you:

  • Allow People to post comments on new articles basically equates to “allow comments”. You can change this on a per post basis.
  • Enable Threaded / Nested Comments I don’t typically set this up for my clients as it’s confusing to many users on the front end.
  • Break comments into pages… I don’t set this up either as very few clients get enough comments to warrant breaking them up into pages.
  • Before a comment appears allows you to control how comments will be moderated, either requiring an administrator to always manually go into WordPress and approve a comment, or allowing anyone who’s already had one comment approved comment automatically.

Media

This controls how media is displayed on your site. More information on what “media” is in WordPress can be found here. In general you should not change these settings as I will already have set everything up as it should be for your particular site. Changing any media sizes only affects new media added to the site, not existing images, videos, etc. in posts and pages you’ve already published.

Privacy

You can use this to add some code to your site that asks search engines not to index your pages. Two notes about this:

  • Doing so does not guarantee that they won’t still include you in their listings, though guys like Google, Yahoo!, etc. typically respect this. You may still appear in their results for some time after you switch this, as they need to crawl your site again before knowing that you’ve made this change.
  • That said, if you do try and block the search engines, and they honor the request, that means that when someone goes to Google to search for your company or for anything else for that matter, you will not show up, and therefore will likely have very little to no traffic on your site.

Permalinks

Do not change anything on this page! Your site will break, in that links from all over your site’s pages will return 404 errors, meaning “Page not found”, meaning your site will be very difficult to impossible to navigate.

← Back to the WordPress Walk Thru

Up Next: About WordPress User "Roles"