Changing general blog information
You may need to change or add some general blog information after a successful installation (such as the blog title or a one-sentence description) to get your website set up and running with the correct information. To get started with this, navigate to Settings in the main menu:
There are many options you can set here, most of which are self-explanatory. We'll look at the most important ones. Obviously, you can change your blog's title. Mine is called Daily Cooking, for example. You can also change the blog description, which is used in most themes as a subtitle for the blog, like the subtitle of a book. The default description is Just another WordPress site. You'll probably want to change that. Let's change ours to Exploring cooking every day of the week:
One of the things you probably want to take a look at on this page is the Timezone option. Whether you have a blog (with timestamps on every post) or not, it's important that WordPress knows what time zone you're in. Particularly when you want to schedule a page or post for the future, show users accurate time stamps, or even just make sure that email notifications are correctly timestamped. Additionally, if you're planning to publish content internationally, meaning that your target audience is located in an entirely different location, it's good to set the time zone to represent your target audience and not yourself.
The pull-down menu will show you different UTC settings, along with the biggest cities around the world. Just choose a city in your favored time zone. After you save the changes, the time that appears further down the page (next to Time Format) will change to the time you chose, so that you can check and make sure it's correct.
Another feature worth considering on this page is whether or not you want to allow user registration on your site. For most sites, this is not particularly useful, but if you're planning to make the site community-driven or utilize some form of crowdsourcing, then this might be worth considering. In that case, it's not advisable to give new users a user role higher than Subscriber (the default value).
When you're done making changes to this page, be sure to click on the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
Finally, there's only one more component you should adjust in your new site's settings before publishing any content: the permalinks. As WordPress defines them, permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual pages, blog posts, categories, and tags. By default, WordPress links to your new posts using a highly unoptimized URL structure. For instance, if you create a post titled How to Cook the Best Meal Ever, WordPress will link it as http://yoursite.com/?p=123 (or something similar). The main problem with this structure is that it doesn't indicate what the page is about. Neither your visitors nor Google will be able to make a guess. In the case of Google, such a structure can also significantly impact your future search engine rankings. Therefore, to set a more optimized structure, you can go to Settings | Permalinks. Here are the available settings:
The best setting from a visitor's point of view, as well as from Google's, is the one labeled Post name. Going back to the example with the How to Cook the Best Meal Ever post, if you set the permalinks to Post name, the URL of this post will be http://yoursite.com/how-to-cook-the-best-meal-ever/, which is a lot clearer and predictable. You can always review the official information on permalinks whenever you wish at https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks.
Further down the page, there are also optional settings for Category base and Tag base. By default, Category base is set to category. For example, if you have a category called recipes then you can view all posts under this category at http://yoursite.com/category/recipes.
Some site owners prefer to change this to something more user-friendly, for example, topics. Even though this conveys the exact same message, it can be much easier to grasp for visitors who are not that familiar with the standards of web content publishing. In the end, your category base is solely down to your discretion. Tag base, on the other hand, rarely needs any adjustments.