In this section, I will outline some additional configurations you may wish to make on your site to help customize it to suit your needs. 

Static Front Page and Posts Page

By default WordPress sets your front page to be a page that lists all your blog posts. You can change this to provide a static page - that is any specific page on your website. You must first create the page before selecting the page as the static front page. 

For your blog posts page you have two choices. You can use the one generated by WordPress, or you can create your own page and use a menu to directly link to it. 

Users

By default the name of the admin user is “admin”. If you are the primary user of the site, you will want to change the display name of the admin user to be your name. If anyone else will be contributing to your website, you can set them up as users. 

Permalinks

Permalinks are direct links to specific posts or pages on your website. You can set the format for how these are auto generated using the settings menu. You should set this once when you first set up your site and not change it. Changing it will cause the permalinks to be reset on all existing content. You can override an auto generated permalink for a given page or post when you create or edit the page or post.

Tags and Categories

Tags and categories are different ways to organize your blog posts, allowing your readers to discover posts based upon their interests. Loosely, you could think of categories as chapters, except that they are on a website and a given post can exist in more than one category. 

Categories are usually accessed through a list of available categories, which are often made available in the sidebar of the blog. 

Tags on the other hand are more like an intentional index of your site. Each post can have as many tags as you like. Tags are often represented the sidebar of a blog as a tag cloud - which is represented differently depending on the theme. Some themes display the tag cloud with the text size related to the frequency of the tag, where others just label them. 

Site Performance

If you are finding that your site is getting slow, there is a great article on Reclaim Hosting - Troubleshooting slow sites. This is useful regardless of whether you are using Reclaim Hosting. 

What is caching? WordPress dynamically generates each page in your website every time someone navigates to it. Caching creates a static version of each page, allowing the site to load faster. If you make significant changes to your site, you will want to “clear” the cache to ensure that it gets updated correctly. Most caching plugins do this automatically for you. 

Subdomains

When you are exploring themes and plugins, use a clone of your site on a subdomain so that you don’t break your original site. 

Demonstration: Creating a subdomain and installing WordPress using cPanel - https://youtu.be/jF1HD_p7d48

Cloning Your Site

Demonstration: https://youtu.be/4JV6QK_3X94