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My Process for Setting up and Configuring a new Wordpress blog in 60 Minutes or less
*UPDATE 2008*
My routine for setting up Wordpress sites has changed a bit. Mainly because I now have so many Wordpress sites that I’ve found better plugins to use, and some of the ones I used to love aren’t good anymore. In addition to that I’ve learned more about SEO and how to manage wordpress more effectively, which is why I started the series Managing Wordpress More Effectively. For the purposes of this article alone it’s limited to what you can do to setup a blog in an hour or less. For more detailed instructions, please read the entire series! I’ve updated this article and republished it today because it’s one of the most viewed on this site (and it was getting a lot of activity this week).
I’ve setup a few dozen wordpress blog sites in the last year, and it’s led to developing a standard routine for getting it done in the quickest and most effective way. I decided to post this in an ordered list, and hopefully it helps someone - but this is also self serving as I can reference this myself if I don’t set one up again for awhile. These are tips I’ve learned from dozens of other sites, and it really gets the site ready for publishing in short order. It takes care of a little bit of seo, your feeds and stats, you’ll be ready for any kind of media upload or download tracking, you’ll have both comments and related posts, more control over your home page, better archives, comment subscription, rss by email, ready to add amazon affiliate links by drag and drop, sitemaps for both google and Yahoo, you’ll be ‘digg ready’ and more! This is the process I followed to setup this site, and I’m hoping that eventually we can get some great comments to add update and add even more value to this post. I’ve provided links to everything I thought you might need more info on. Of course all info is regarding a wordpress self-hosted web site. Here we go!
*UPDATE* I’m not linking plugins on this list anymore - just visit my Wordpress Plugins Used page to get all the links you need after you read the checklist.
- Get the lastest version of Wordpress, download and install
- Find a new wordpress theme with a good layout and upload
- Login for the first time and activate askimet module with API key. I also upload and enable Wordpress.com Stats plugin using the exact same API key.
- Add first “welcome to the site” post, delete default post
- Delete first comment and “hello dolly” plugin
- Under “Options->Permalinks” enable “custom” /%postname%/ for clean SEO friendly url’s
- Click update to .htaccess file, if it fails make .htaccess writeable
- Update the list of ‘ping’ services in ‘options->writing’. Be default there only one, and you want to notify as many services as possible every time you post. Here is the the most up to date list of ping services I could find.
- Aizatto’s Related Posts
- Askimet
- Author Highlight
- Breadcrumb
- Brian’s Threaded Comments
- cForms II
- Code Auto Escape
- Commentluv
- Comment Relish
- Custom Smilies
- Digg This
- Digital Fingerprint
- Dofollow
- Enforce www. preference
- Feedburner Feedsmith
- Feedcount
- Full Feed Text
- Google Analytics
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Homepage Excerpts
- RSS Feed Signature
- Subscribe to Comments
- WP-DB Manager
- WP-PageNavi
- WP-PostViews
- WP-Print
- wpSEO
- WP-Amazon
- Activate Amazon module, enter id in setup and choose setup options. This particular module is the best I’ve seen, once setup it allows you to search for amazon items directly from you ‘Write’ page in wordpress admin (in a sidebar) - and you can drag and drop the pics and link text right into your post. No more copy and pasting amazon affiliate code!
- Active google analytics module, enter id in setup choose setup options. If you don’t already have a google analytics account - get one!
- Activate google sitemap plugin and add entry in webmaster console
- Add sitemap url and feed url in Yahoo! Site Explorer console
- Add sitemap URL in MSN Live Webmaster Tools
- Create Feedburner feed and activate Feedburner Feedsmith to redirect RSS feed from your site directly to feedburner every time
- Activate Feedcount and add custom code to sidebar for subscriber count
- Activate Digg This plugin. You’ll never know this plugin is doing anything (unless one of your pages gets dugg). If and when it does - this plugin comes alive, detecting traffic from digg.com - it displays a link back to digg (to digg the post) and also emails the site’s admin that ‘you’ve been dugg’! Very handy - just in case! You have to add the code to your single.php file for everyting to work properly.
- Activate the Enforce www. plugin. Basically this is going to solve your duplicate content problems with www.site.com/page and site.com/page problems. The search crawlers could index the same page twice otherwise one with www. and one without.
- Activate the Subscribe to Comments plugin. How many times have you been to a post and found yourself going back to the page repeatedly to see the latest comments? Some sites have options for getting email when you post a comment, but what if you don’t post and still want to be notified when there are new comments? Solution - Subscribe to comments!
- Activate Aizatto’s Related Posts (no code to add, works automatically)
- Activate Author Highlight (highlights admin comments when you reply)
- Activate Brian’s Threaded Comments, and replace comments.php with the one supplied in the plugin
- Activate cforms II and create a contact form for the site and contact page to add it to
- Activate Code Auto Escape (if you will be posting code snippets for people to read)
- Activate Commentluv, which when people comment will parse their RSS feed for the URL listed in their comment and list and link the last post from their blog as a byline beneath their comment (very nice!)
- Activate Comment Relish and create a new message for the options page to be displayed to new visitors to your site
- Activate Custom Smilies and add the code to your comments form for them to display
- Activate Digital Fingerprint and on the options page add a unique text identifier that you can google to see if people are stealing your content or scraping your site
- Activate Dofollow (if you want dofollow throughout your site)
- Activate Full Feed Text (if you want your RSS feed to contain full posts instead of the default “more” provided by Wordpress
- Activate Homepage Excerpts (if you don’t want every post on your homepage to be full. Be default I only have 1 full post, and 9 excerpts.
- Activate DBManager so you can backup and do maintenance on your database when necessary
- Activate PageNavi and replace the “previous” and “next” links in your page.php, index.php, and archive.php with the PageNavi code for MUCH better navigation options where visitor’s can see how many pages there are, and go to the beginning or end at any time
- Activate WP-Print to give your readers a printer friendly link for all posts
- Activate WP-PostViews so you can add a view counter to your posts and pages
- Activate wpSEO and setup complete SEO options for your site including meta descriptions, keywords, and defaults
- Create a robots.txt for specifically for Wordpress. The reason for this is - you want to help the search crawlers out and avoid content duplication problems (again). You’ll come up better in search results, and keep the crawler from trying to follow permalinks, admin pages, includes, javascript and css files, your rss feed, and category pages. Do this before you post anything!
- Claim your blog in your technorati profile. This way you can see your blog’s popularity build and watch your authority factor grow.
- Add tags, badges, chiclets, and widgets. I usually add one to add to technorati favorites, and sometimes (for more established sites) the Yahoo badge for incoming links. I use the feedcount module, so I don’t need the feedburner chiclet. But I do setup my feedburner feed to list subscription, email, delicious, digg and stumble links to the feed itself. I also enabled the copyright footer (in the feed) in case someone tries to hijack or repurpose my posts. I added the custom code (from feedburner) to my theme to have the sub, email, digg, etc. links at the end of each post as well. Feedburner is awesome! I added the myBlogLog widget, and a buzzfeed one as well, because I like them both. Customize your blog with the ones that you like and that will service your visitors best!
Add third party plugins, this is my current list, but the ones here are the ones I favor most and “have to have” on each and ever default install. Get the links from the current plugin list page:
In no particular order:
Ok, now you are ready to write posts in your blog!! Post away, post every day, or at least regularly. Your blog is now going to work really hard behind the scenes for you, announcing your new articles via ping and sitemap, waiting for that fateful day when you get dugg, tracking activity in reports in bsuite, and much, much more. Choosing the right plugins that will do work for you, or better serve your readers is just working smarter, not harder. If you have something to add to this article that really works for you when setting up a new wordpress blog - please, please add it in the comments below. If I change my routine or learn something new, I’ll be sure to update this page asap!
Tags: best-practices, blog-help, tutorial, wordpress-hacks
July 11th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Awesome list. Though there are few things I don’t use , but I can not think if you missed out anything. Seems like I will have to bookmark this. :)
July 11th, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Sorry me again. The question is could you explain and elaborate the first point. I can see that worth explaining as to what are the best practices to ‘install’ wordpress.
July 16th, 2007 at 6:58 am
Hello, how can i do Adsense Injection (if template isn’t already setup for adsense) ?
July 18th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
ok, to address “Wordpress Advice” and the question regarding setting up Wordpress. To use Wordpress on a self-hosted web site, you need to either be able to download and set it up yourself (very easy instructions included), or have an “auto-installer” in your web site control panel (like Fantastico). I can and have done it both ways. If you do it yourself, all you really have to do is have the ability to create a new mySQL database and assign it a username and a password. The enter these into the wp-config.php file (like the instructions tell you to do) and upload all the wordpress files to your site. Then, the first time you run it the database tables are automatically created and the site is live (provided you followed all the steps correctly). If you use an auto-installer, then you just enter your username, password, and blog title in a form and when you click submit it does all that work for you automatically. I like auto-intallers like Fantastico because they not only do all the work, but (the newer versions) also will upgrade to the latest version of Wordpress with one click of a button. That was very handy the last time I had to upgrade 13 wordpress sites at once!
July 18th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
to “adsense”, if you want to do Adsense Injection, download the plugin using the link above and upload to your Wordpress site in /wp-content/plugins directory. Then in your wp admin panel, enable the plugin. Setup your options in Options->Adsense, and it will automatically insert adsense blocks (in the sizes that you choose) in your pages, posts, titles, etc. for you. This is a great plugin to use if you don’t have an adsense-ready theme - it does all the work for you!
July 20th, 2007 at 7:10 am
I discuss many of these same issues in my post-installation WordPress routine. One thing I’d like to point out is that I think it’s better to wait until you’ve completed setting up the blog before deleting the precanned post and making your first real post. If you do it too early, traffic will start arriving at your blog before you’re really ready for it. Better to wait.
July 27th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Hi JT,
Could you please clarify #7 above:
# Click update to .htaccess file, if it fails make .htaccess writeable
I updated the permalink as instructed, however I don’t know where to update the .htaccess file.
YOur assistance would be appreciated.
Cheers
Shelley
July 28th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Would you please explain how to do #7 (Click update to .htaccess file, if it fails make .htaccess writeable)? I have no idea what you are talking about here. Also, does it make a difference if the blog is in a folder (i.e. url.com/blog/.htaccess)? I ask because this means a site will have two .htaccess files (one in the root directory and one in the blog folder).
Thank you,
Rochelle
Rochelles last blog post..How to Add a WordPress Blog to Your Site
July 28th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
@Shelley - In your Wordpress dashboard when you update your permalink you should get one of two things back…you either get a message stating that your .htaccess file has (automatically) been updated, or you get a message that says - “update your .htaccess with this code (since we couldn’t because it wasn’t writable)”.
First let me explain…in your FTP program in the root of your site (like public_html or whatever) you should see a file listed first called “.htaccess”. This is a special file with an extension only and no name. SOME ftp programs “hide” it, so you never see it. Nearly every FTP program has a setting to “show hidden files”. If you don’t see yours - unhide it. Then right click it with your mouse and try to change the permission properties to “777″ or world writable. Then update your permalinks again in the WP dashboard and see if it takes. If you can’t make it writable in FTP, try your web site control panel - you should have a “file manager” where you can make it writable there (and then update in your WP dashboard again.
Hope this helps!
July 28th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
@Rochelle - see my previous comment for the .htaccess info. To answer your second question, if you blog is in a folder - like “/blog” - you will have one there, like “/blog/.htaccess”…but you won’t also have one in the root of your site unless you install something there that requires it. For example, if you installed build a niche store in an /ebay folder and Wordpress in the root, you would have one .htaccess file for each. Commonly an .htaccess file is used to restrict permissions or re-write URL’s into pretty SEO style…
July 31st, 2008 at 12:55 pm
[...] his own list of steps to take when getting a blog ready for posting (you can see his list at Best Practices for Setting Up a New WordPress Blog in 60 Minutes or Less). His list is excellent, but catered to him. My list is catered to me, so it will differ somewhat [...]
August 2nd, 2008 at 5:49 am
[...] his own list of steps to take when getting a blog ready for posting (you can see his list at Best Practices for Setting Up a New WordPress Blog in 60 Minutes or Less). His list is excellent, but catered to him. My list is catered to me, so it will differ somewhat [...]