Hi everyone, I am back with another post in which you will learn about things which you should do after setting up your WordPress blog.

Before I go in detail please read the post about installing wordpress on your hosting space because the to-do list I will be discussing in this post come after installing the WP on server. If you are too new for these stuffs then I would like you to read the post about how to start a blog step by step also.

Okay so now I assume you have the wordpress installed on your hosting space and domain is set up with the same as well. Now you are ready to start blogging but there are few things you must do before you write your first blog post.

Let’s discuss those things which you need to do now:

1. Delete Default user “Admin”

The Default wordpress login user is “admin”. If you keep this then you are inviting hackers to make brute force attack on your blog to hack because it is very common that anyone can guess.

In order to stay on safer side, Create another user with some other name by going to Users>> Add new and then give admin rights to this user. Now delete the default user “admin”

2. Get Akismet API key

When you install WordPress, you can see a plugin called Akismet is already there in plugins section. This plugin helps you keep your comment folder clean by sending all the spam comments in the spam folder. To make this plugin work, activate it and get its API key from its official site and enter it in your blog.

3. Permalinks Settings

It is structure setting of URL. You can do it by going to Setting>> Permalinks in your wordpress blog’s dashboard. You can choose any structure from the given list there or write your own structure using “Custom” option. My personal suggestion to use /%postname%/.

Must Read: Why and How To change Permalinks of an established blog?

4. Generate Sitemap and submit it to the Webmaster Tool

The next thing you should do is to generate sitemap for your blog and submit it into the Google webmaster tool. To generate sitemap you can install Google XML sitemap generator.

Now to submit xml sitemap to Webmaster tool your blog needs to be verified so do the verification of your site first. To do this submit your site to webmaster and get verification code from there and install it on your blog as per the instructions given in GWT.

Submitting sitemap to webmaster is an important task because it helps Google Crawlers find your blog and its internal pages easily. Basically it helps to make the blog’s crawling faster.

5. Set Up Google Analytics

Google analytics is a tool which tells you every detail of the traffic you get on your blog. Hence in order analyse your blog’s traffic install GA on your blog.

To do this, just submit your site in GA, get tracking code from there and install on your blog as per the instruction mentioned there in GA.

6. Install SEO plugins

Installing an SEO plugin is essential. You can install as per your requirement out of All in one SEO, WordPressSEO by Yoast, SEO ultimate, SEOpressor.

These plugins are used for different task so you should install them as per your need. Personally I would suggest installing All in one SEO at the very first.

7. Choose a good theme

Either get a free WordPress theme or buy a premium theme to use on your blog but make sure that they do not have vulnerable codes. Only use themes from good vendors for security concern.

Recommended Reading: How to Choose the Perfect Theme for your WordPress Blog?

I suggest to go with premium themes because they are good at security as well as they don’t have buggy codes which make them load faster.

Once you get the theme, upload and activate it. Few good themes are Thesis, MythemeShop, theme Junkie Etc.

8. Install Social Sharing buttons

Social shares become important for blog posts in order to get good exposure on social media. So it’s your responsibility to make it easier for your readers to share your content and to do that add social sharing buttons for your blog posts either by manually placing the codes or by using plugins.

If you want to go with plugins then Flare, digg digg, Shareholic and addthis are best choices.

9. Change blog’s time Zone

It’s good to set the time zone of blog as per your geographic location. You can do this by going to Settings>>General. Check Screenshot:

10. Install Backup plugin

Hacking is now a common thing online so to be on safer side keeping backup of your site is essential. To get automatic backups, install backup plugin to keep backing your blog daily or weekly as per your posting frequency. Backwpup, backupbuddy, wordpress backup to Dropbox are some good plugins.

11. Set up about and contact pages

About and contact pages are the integral parts of a website or blog because with about page people know about you and the blog and Contact page gives them access to contact you directly. Hence it’s indeed necessary to set up these pages in the very beginning.

You can add new pages simply by going to pages >> Add new.

Final words

This is not the end, there a lot of task you have to do after installing the WordPress but this is the list of things which are most essential to get started and later on you can keep implementing other things.

Hope you like this post!