Configuring WordPress on iPage Part 1

okay so in the last video we installed WordPress in this video we are going to configure it I’m not going to cover in total detail every single thing you’ll end up needing to do to your specific WordPress installation I’m just going to cover the things that are obvious and always need to happen it’s going to be up to you to learn WordPress and read about this the different plugins available and you know generally get to know how to use
WordPress that’s part of the the process here in not paying for a web designer you have to sort of learn some of the stuff yourself and become one so that being said let’s get going on the obvious stuff so with I page your WordPress installation will come pre-loaded with a bunch of stuff you don’t need at all so we’re going to go to your plugins area right away and we’re gonna look at the installed plugins there are a bunch of warnings up at the
top a lot of them will go away once we start to disengage and deactivate and delete these plugins so we can do this with bulk actions so Hello Dolly we’ll check that and total cache and we will deactivate those and hit apply now that those are deactivated we can click that as well as let’s deactivate mojo as well I forgot to do that okay so dolly mojo total cache let’s delete them you can individually delete all of them if you like but I like to
use the bulk actions it’s a bit faster so it’s gonna ask if we’re sure yes let’s delete these files and they’re gone so now all we have is jetpack and to activate jetpack I’ve already logged in with my wordpress.com account but if you don’t have a wordpress.com account which you probably don’t you’ll have to head over to wordpress.com and sign up for a wordpress.com account so there’s wordpress.com and wordpress.org to use jetpack you need a
wordpress.com account so I’ve already got that so I’ll connect my jetpack all up and it’s gonna take a second to load a lot of the stuff that you’re going to be doing with WordPress does take a couple moments so be patient and I’m going to approve the connection to my WordPress account and now jetpack is ready to go jetpack I absolutely guarantee is a good idea for you guys to use so make sure to go to wordpress.com sign up for wordpress.com and
then use that account to approve a connection to jetpack on your self hosted WordPress installation on your hosting plan with high page if all this stuff sounds really complicated just let it glaze over your mind and don’t worry about understanding it we’re just gonna follow along for now I’m gonna hit jump start if this page comes up for you we can do that if you haven’t done any of this stuff yet just do it later I’m going to auto activate a
lot of these plugins later on you can do this in any sequence it doesn’t really matter when you do this stuff but what I’m doing in broad terms is I’m setting up the the WordPress site for 98% of the users out there the what I’m doing here is always kind of a good idea so right away let’s go over to your settings and permalinks so in the sidebar here we’re gonna find permalinks and the default structure of WordPress is to give a numbered
permalink which is not very helpful we want a post name to show up and this is better for search engine optimization because if you have a post a blog post or a website one of your pages for your website you want then the words of that blog posts such as how to configure WordPress to appear in the URL it’s better for Google’s ability to rank that page as opposed to this question mark P equals one to three you don’t want you want your post name so
just click post name and then Save Changes don’t worry about understanding it it’s just whatever you’re doing here it’s it’s good later so you can just trust that so we’ve saved those changes it gives you a confirmation up here that the permalinks structure has been updated and then we can go back to the dashboard so what I like to do in the dashboard itself is go to screen options and I don’t need to see the WordPress news I don’t really care
about the quick draft I like to see the site stats the activity is nice to leave and the at a glance sometimes that’s kind of nice too but maybe I’ll drag that over here and maybe I’ll drag the site stats up to the top when you start to get traffic on your site it’s nice to see that traffic as soon as you log in to your WordPress dashboard next we’re going to go to if if you are in the mindset of changing your password you can do that under users
your profile and you can change your password to anything you like WordPress generally does default to give you a very secure password but when you create your new password make sure to include numbers uppercase and lowercase letters as well as symbols just for that level of security WordPress sites do get hacked all the time so make sure you have a very strong password to prevent that I’m not going to do that here cuz I’ve already done it and
for the security of this video I don’t want to be showing you guys my password let’s go to appearance and themes this is where things can get fun for you for this area the one thing to remember is that you only want the theme that you’re using to be active so by default you’re gonna have a bunch of themes in here most of which almost all of them you’re not gonna want to keep if you keep old themes that compromises the security of your site so you
want to make sure to delete the themes that you’re not using so I’ll show you how to do that let’s click on one of them and then in the bottom right there’s a little red delete option let’s click that and then okay that’s how you delete a theme I will delete all of these themes and I will add a theme that I want to use in here what I click add theme I can browse the themes so this is where you can choose any theme that looks good to you and you
can preview these themes you can install them if you like there’s an install button there you can ex out and check out other themes it’s up to you to choose a theme you like and the one that makes the most sense with the type of site you’re trying to build and to delete the themes that you’re not using so back to the themes area once I’ve installed the theme that I like I’m gonna make sure to delete all of these other themes you won’t be able to
delete the active theme so right now this theme is active if I make this one active so let’s activate this one then now that one’s active and that other one is eligible for deletion but I’m not going to do that right now I’m just kind of telling you guys that you should delete all of these themes that you’re not using only keep the one that you are using as well right now there are no comments and there are also no updates available you will see
a little number and it’ll probably be highlighted and orange or red pretty soon after you’ve created your site always click that and always update the plugins and themes that you’re using because if you don’t people can hack your site a lot easier I’ll show you how to install a plug-in the first plug-in that I always like to install we’re gonna go to plugins and then add new and let’s let’s search for word fence because that’s a good one for
keeping your site secure I’m always I always always always install word fence security so let’s install that and it’s gonna take a second to download those files and I’m gonna activate that plug-in by clicking the link in the in the description here you can run through the tour if you like it’s very it’s very technical I wouldn’t say that you need to do it you can also include your email address if you would like alerts every time weird press
finds some kind of a problem with your site I did I don’t generally put my email address in there and I don’t really want to know about the WordPress you know alerts and news and stuff so I don’t put that put my stuff there most of the time so I’m gonna leave that out and you’ll see that it’s activated so we’re good to go if you want to go into the settings for the WordPress security you can do that under this wordfence panel but just installing
word fence alone is often enough to really secure your site nicely another plug-in that is very very important and we’re gonna go to add new again