In my last WordPress post, I talked about how to set up a secure installation of WordPress. In this post, I suggest eight things to change in the WordPress backend before you install your theme. These tweaks make for a better set up, and they make things easier down the road.

1: Change your permalinks
By default, a WordPress URL will look like: http://example.com/?p=N, where N is the unique post ID. This is ugly, hard for site visitors to remember and less than ideal for SEO. Frankly, I’m not sure why WordPress doesn’t make “pretty permalinks” the default. Once pretty permalinks are enabled, URLs will look like: http://example.com/post-name.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Settings / Permalinks;
2. In the Custom Structure field, type /%postname%/
3. Click the Save Changes button.

2: If the site is not going to be a blog, remove the ability to comment
Nuf said.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Settings / Discussion;
2. In the “Default article settings” section, uncheck all three items: “Attempt…”, “Allow link…” and “Allow people…”
3. Click the Save Changes button.

3: Delete the “Hello World!” post
By default, WordPress includes a sample post and sample comment so you can see what those will look like after you load your theme. Again, if the site is not going to be a blog, you can delete them right away. If it is going to be a blog, you can keep these around for testing or delete them. ‘Sup to you.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Posts / Posts;
2. Find the “Hello World” post, hover over the title, and then click the Trash link when it appears;
3. If you’d like to permanently get rid of it, click the Trash link at the top of the page, find the post again and click the Delete Permanently link.

4: Change silly folder structure for media uploads
For some strange, user-unfriendly reason, by default WordPress stores any uploads in date-centric folders like 2010/09/ according to the date you uploaded the file. This is especially useless when you’re going back and trying to change a file and can’t remember the date you uploaded it. Again, why this is the default is baffling.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Settings / Media;
2. Uncheck “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”;
3. Click the Save Changes button.

5: Increase the size of the editor window
By default the post editor window is only 10 lines high, so it makes for a lot of unnecessary scrolling. Thankfully there’s a way to increase the window size.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Settings / Writing;
2. Change the entry in the “Size of the post box” field from 10 to 20 or 25;
3. Click the Save Changes button.

6: Set your local time zone
By default, the WordPress time zone is set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). You’ll want to change this so that the correct time stamp is applied to your posts and pages as you create them.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Settings / General;
2. In the Timezone drop-down menu, select your local time zone;
3. Click the Save Changes button.

7: Delete the Hello Dolly plugin
Apparently, Matt Mullenweg is a Louis Armstrong fan. So when you first install WordPress, it automatically loads the Hello Dolly plugin that puts a Louis Armstrong lyric at the top of each page of your admin screen. Even worse, every time you update WordPress, it reappears, just like a virus.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Plugins / Plugins;
2. Find the Hello Dolly plugin;
3. Click Delete;
4. On the confirmation screen, click the “Yes, delete these files” button;

8: Add the Smush.it plugin
Yahoo has an excellent image optimization service called Smush.it. It removes unnecessary colors and data from any image file which speeds up the load time for those images on your site. Thankfully, there’s a WordPress plugin that automatically runs images through the smush.it process whenever they’re uploaded via the Media uploader.

1. In your WordPress control panel, go to Plugins / Plugins;
2. Click the Add New button at the top of the screen;
3. Type “smushit” into the search field and click the Search Plugins button;
4. Find the WP Smush.it plugin in the list;
5. Click the “Install now” link and the “OK” confirmation button;
6. After the installation is complete, click the “Activate Plugin” link.

Thar ya go

These simple tweaks will make your WordPress installation cleaner and more user-friendly.

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