10 Default WordPress Settings to Make Your Site Faster, Easier to Use, and More Secure[2022]

Installing WordPress and building a website on WordPress is an easy task because when you buy a web hosting plan, almost all hosting providers give you WordPress pre-installed. From where you can open your website.

If you want to become the most secure and Fast-loading website to rank in Google, then there are some settings that you should do before publishing content or setting up an online store.

One thing you can do to optimize your website speed and load time from the beginning is to do some quick tweaks to the default WordPress settings. To optimize your website from the very start, check out these default WordPress settings that every website owner needs to change after installing WordPress, whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or e-commerce shop, owner.

Change the Site Title, Tagline, and Timezone

If you navigate to Settings > General in the WordPress dashboard, you’ll notice a bunch of different settings that, by default, have been set for you.

Here you’ll want to focus on three: site title, tagline, and timezone.

It is recommended that you change the default site title from “My WordPress Website” to something more relevant, which will help you to communicate to your site visitors what you have to offer, brand your business, and improve your search engine rankings.

It is not very professional to use the default tagline for a WordPress website. It is also helpful to add a short tagline to let visitors know what your site is all about and what they can expect to see.

The change of the timezone from the default Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to the time zone in which you and the majority of your visitors reside will decrease confusion regarding eCommerce orders, the date and time of published posts and media uploads, comments left on blog posts, and even countdown timers.

Want to make a few more changes? Make sure the Membership checkbox is unchecked to prevent site visitors (especially spammers) from registering on your website and accessing your login page. Also, change the default date and time formats and pick which day to start the week on.

Create Search-Engine Friendly Permalinks

Permalinks are URLs that people see in their browser when they click on pages on your website.

Default WordPress permalinks look like this: http://yourdomain.com/p=123.

Although the link is short, it is not SEO friendly for search engine bots to crawl your site and index you for relevant search results.

To make your permalinks short and SEO friendly, go to Settings > Permalinks and select the Post name option. Creating pretty permalinks will help you drive more traffic to your site, display keywords in the URL, and boost overall SEO.

By doing so, you will create a permalink that shows part of the post name in the URL, which is easily visible to crawlers indexing your site and understandable to visitors.

Take a look at this example:

Delete Default Post, Page, and Comment Content

WordPress comes with default dummy content which acts as a placeholder before adding your own content. It includes a sample post, page, and comment.

This content is easy to remove and your site visitors will not be able to see this content once they have visited your site.

To view a sample post, go to Posts > All Posts in your WordPress dashboard. Find a post that says “Hello world!” And click on the Trash link.

To delete the sample page, go to Pages > All Pages and trash the “Sample Page” just as you did the sample post.

Lastly, to delete the example comment, go to Comment and delete the default comment.

Change the Homepage and Posts Page

By default, WordPress displays your site’s blogs on the home page. However, if you’re running a small business website, don’t have a lot of blog content to display, or want to direct people to your eCommerce store instead, you can use a static page as your home page instead.

To do this, go to Settings > Reading and select the A static page option under Your homepage displays.

Using a static homepage allows you to create custom layouts for people to view once they land on your website, which can be beneficial even for blogs.

Change Admin Details & Reset Your Password

You can your details and reset your password very easily, read the points given below.

Change Your WP-Admin Details

To do this, navigate to Users > Your Profile in the WordPress dashboard and scroll down to the section labeled Name.

Then, enter your first, last, and display name that you want to appear on your website in the author box.

Reset Your WP Password

One of the easiest ways to make your WordPress website more secure is to change the default password you use to sign in to the WordPress dashboard.

To do this, navigate to Users > Your Profile in the WordPress dashboard and scroll down to the section labeled Account Management.

Then, click Generate Password to get a new password.

Delete Unused Themes

There is no point in keeping themes that you are not going to use, as they take up space and pose potential security risks. Delete major themes, especially ones that are not updated.

So how do you uninstall a theme that is inactive?

You go to Appearance > Themes and you hover over the theme and click on Theme Details. Then, on the bottom-right corner, press Delete.

Change Your WordPress Email

You probably used your own email address when you installed WordPress. It means that any WordPress email that you receive email notifications for is also your personal email, e.g., when someone leaves a comment on your website, completes a contact form, etc.

If you want to have all site notifications sent to a business email or someone on your team that is responsible for monitoring notifications, start by going to Settings > General.

Find the section labeled Email Address and input the email you want notifications sent to.
Remember to use an active email because WordPress will send a confirmation email to it.

Change Uncategorized to your default category

You must have at least one category for every post you publish on your website. WordPress automatically assigns the category “Uncategorized” to a blog post if it isn’t marked with a category when it’s written.
Be sure to change the category first. Which is not a good thing.

To change the default category so site visitors can better understand the content of your blog posts, go to Posts > Categories to Change Category.

After changing Uncategorized to your default category, you will no longer need to go to the writing settings and change the default post category.

Configure Media Settings

By default, WordPress creates multiple sizes for every image you upload to your site. It adds too many unnecessary files to your website which bloat your website and slows down its speed and performance.

To fix this, go to Settings > Media and set all the widths and heights to 0:

Turn off Search engine visibility

SEO plays an important role to rank your website on Google.
If you will turn on this search engine visibility, then the search engines will not crawl your website, which will not rank your website.

You go to Settings > Reading and scroll down.
This option is already off, if it is on then turn it off

Change the Default Gravatar

WordPress uses Gravatar to display photos in the author bio and WordPress comments. If you don’t have Gravatar, WordPress will use the mystery person by default, as in this example below:

To use Gravatar on your website, go to the Gravatar website and create an account using the email address you used to set up your WordPress website.

Then upload the image you want people to see in your author bio and when you comment on your site. This image will also be displayed on any other WordPress sites where you leave comments.

If you want to change the default avatars used for people that comment on your site that don’t have a Gravatar, go to Settings > Discussion in the WordPress dashboard and scroll down to the section labeled Avatars.

Select the avatar you like best and save your changes.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Thirteen of the most common default WordPress settings that you’ll want to change after installing WordPress on a popular web host like BlueHost.

You definitely don’t want your newly created website to be vulnerable to things like brute force attacks, spammers, or other malicious activity.

So, after installing WordPress, before you start publishing content or selling online products, take the time to change some of these key default settings so your site looks good, renders properly, is safe and secure, and is fully optimized.

What do you think about this article?

Are there any default WordPress settings that have been left out of this list that you think are worth adding?
So do tell in the comment below. We read all your comments thoroughly

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