Major things to do after setting up your wordpress blog

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As you all know WordPress is one of the popular CMS (Content Management system) blogging platforms. Every professional blogger likes WordPress. If you’re thinking to start a new blog, I recommend you start with WordPress.

why you should use WordPress?

  • It is free.
  • Easy to Install.
  • Easy to customize design.
  • Easy to tweak codes (not necessary, because you can do it by installing plugins)

Important things to do after setting up your WordPress

Major Things to do after setting up your WordPress blog:

Secure Your Blog:

The first thing to do after installing your WordPress is to secure your blog.

Now, what are the possible security threats for your blog?

  • Basic Hacking
  • Malware attack
  • Code Injection
  • Brute Force attack

How to secure your blog from these threats?

Install Security plugins:

Since WordPress has hundreds of security plugins, choose the best. I recommend the two best security plugins

  • Bulletproof Security:

This is one of the best security plugins to come across. BulletProof Security plugin protects your WordPress website against XSS, RFI, CRLF, CSRF code injection, etc. This plugin protects your .htaccess file so that the hacker’s malicious scripts are stopped by this security plugin.

  • Wordfence Security:

This plugin lets you know what is going on on your site within the WordPress dashboard. You can block any IPs. It scans your whole files, themes, etc. not only that, it can identify and repair malicious scripts in the file. Also, it has Firewall security which you can control or block any fake crawlers.

Choose a good & well-coded theme:

Every brand has its identity. So, to look different and unique you need to come up with a good design. A good design means attractive, easy-to-navigate menus. I recommend sticky (fixed) menus. Create a good-looking logo, It is important as it represents your brand.

Always use premium themes WordPress themes, there are good themes like MyThemeShop, and StudioPress. Here’s a list of places where you can buy premium themes.

Also, you can also use WordPress themes with Adsense-ready design to get better results and more earnings.

Use W3C Markup Validation to check whether your theme is well-coded or not. This tool checks for XML and HTML errors. If any theme shows more than 50 errors even before installing any plugin, don’t use it.

Add Google Webmaster Tools:

This Webmaster tool is a free tool provided by Google to give complete insights into your website Including traffic optimization, analytics of indexing, crawl errors, malware report, and much more.

Adding your site or blog to Google Webmaster tools is pretty easy. Login to webmaster tools, Add your site URL it’ll ask you to verify your site. There are instructions you need to alter accordingly.

Add Google Analytics:

Google Analytics generates detailed statistics of your traffic, traffic sources, bounce rate, the conversation of your sales, etc. Also, you can analyze the time metrics, content reports, etc.

Create an Email Newsletter:

You might have heard about email marketing. Email marketing is an efficient way to convert your subscriber into potential customers. Creating an email newsletter is easy. There are many email marketing services. I suggest MailChimp because they offer free service until you reach 2000 subscribers. Use an attractive Email Opt-in form to capture your visitors. 

Create and submit a Sitemap:

 A sitemap is a list of pages of a blog/website accessible to crawlers.

What are the uses of sitemaps?

  • A sitemap allows crawl robots to crawl your site easily.
  • Sitemap helps to index your content quickly.

You can easily create a sitemap using a plugin called ‘Simple google Sitemap XML’.

It automatically generates a sitemap of your site. Also, you can exclude any pages you don’t want to include in your sitemap.

Hide unnecessary Pages:

You should hide unnecessary pages from search engines. It can be done by adding ‘nofollow’ attribute. The best you can do is install an SEO by Yoast plugin, with this plugin you can add ‘nofollow’ attribute to certain pages.

Set backups:

What if something goes wrong and you lose all your content? What do you do? Well, if you don’t back up your site regularly you might regret it. So, it is crucial that you always keep a backup of your site. There are many plugins to do this. Some plugins even send daily backups of your whole site to your email inbox.

Submit your site to Alexa:

 Alexa measures the global traffic rank, and popularity of a website and ranks accordingly. So, to get the Alexa rankings, you need to submit your site to Alexa.com.

Set up an RSS feed:

RSS is simply known as ‘Rich site summary’ or ‘Really simply syndication.

Advantages of RSS:

  • It notifies your readers about new posts or updates on your site.
  • It lets your readers read your content without visiting your site.
  • RSS allows personalized views for different sites.

               How to set up an RSS feed:

Setting up an RSS feed is as easy as drinking water. You can use free services like Feedburner. All you need to do is log in to FeedBurner with your google account and set up your website.

Add Social Share Buttons:

Make your readers effortlessly share your content to social networks by adding social share buttons. There are many social share plugins you can install. I use a new plugin called ‘Flare’. As you can see it is attractive.

Install the broken link checker plugin:

Broken links are links that lead to a page that doesn’t exist. When a visitor clicks through these links, they will come across a 404 error. To avoid this you need to install a plugin called broken link checker. It can detect and fix broken links.

Conclusion:

These are the major things to do after setting up your WordPress blog. Doing this, it will not only secure your blog, but it’ll also make your blog look pro and attractive. So, make sure you’ve done the above things right.

About

Adithya Shetty is the creator of The Blog Metrics, a site that is dedicated to WordPress, blogging, and marketing since 2013. He's a Minimalist who loves to read and write.