First Steps inside The WordPress Dashboard as a New Blogger

You just installed WordPress on your new domain, and your site is live. Now what?

There are a couple things to do first inside the WP dashboard and in this post, I’ll show you what they are.

Simplifying your WordPress Dashboard.

For a start, let’s organize what you see at a glance once you open your WordPress site (which you might be doing daily from now on).

Here’s what I see the first time I log into a new blog I just started:

Click Screen Options (on top) and uncheck some of the items that you won’t need.

For me, that would be ‘Activity’, ‘Quick Draft’, and ‘WordPress Events and News’. 

Then close that window, and re-arrange the elements that are left by dragging them around.

Here’s my simple layout now:

More will show up on here once you install some WordPress plugins, but now, it’s fine if it’s almost empty.

Update your profile.

The next step is to personalize your profile a bit.

Go to Users > Profile (from the menu on the left) and add some info about yourself.

You can add your first and last name, and choose how you want your name to be displayed. This will be showing on each post written by you so it’s important.

Double check if the email you’ve provide for contact is correct. 

Below, you can also add your bio and profile picture.

Publish some blog pages.

Go to Pages (from the menu on the left again). 

You can delete the default ones you see there, and then start a new one. 

What you’ll see next is the WordPress editor. Give the page a title, and add some content if you feel like (although you can do that later).

For now, let’s just have those first pages published.

Name the first one ‘Home’ and click publish.

From the 3-dot menu on the top right, you can also choose how you want your editor to look.

There’s a distraction-free option, but I myself prefer to see the menu on the left and top as I often need things from there.

From the top bar, go to New and click Page. 

Now name the new one ‘Blog’ and hit Publish. You’ll need it in a bit.

While you’re on this task, you can also create your About Me page, Contact page, and any other blog page that you’ll be needing soon. 

But it can also happen at a later stage, of course.

Set up your homepage and blog page.

Now go to Settings > Reading from the menu on the left. We’ll do something important.

We’ll tell WordPress which page is your homepage so it can treat it as the main page of the site, and which page to display all your new blog posts on. 

By default, it’s set to this:

Instead, pick the static page option. And from the dropdown menus, choose Home for the Homepage, and Blog for the Posts Page.

Here’s the final result:

While we’re here, a bit below, you’ll see an option to either choose the full text or excerpt for each post in feed. I’d suggest you choose excerpts instead of full text.

Save the changes and let’s move onto the next step.

Add an SSL certificate to your site.

An SSL certificate is what makes your blog secure. It adds the little padlock in the browser and changes your URL from http:// to https://.

It protects any data sent between your site and visitors (like contact form info or login details).

Even if you’re not collecting personal data, Google favors secure sites so having an SSL is a must for SEO and trust.

No need to get extra technical now, though. But you do need to add the SSL as soon as possible, and it’s better now than later.

That happens from your hosting provider, and it’s usually free and can happen with one click. 

I use WPX Hosting, and here’s how I add it.

If you can’t figure out how to do it and are using another hosting provider, you can always contact them about it.

In a couple of minutes, your SSL must be live, and your site will now begin with https. Here’s mine: 

SiteGround includes free SSL certificates with all hosting plans too. 

To install a new one from Site Tools (in your SiteGround dashboard), go to Security > SSL Manager > Install New SSL.

Select the domain, choose Let’s Encrypt and click Get.

There’s something we need to update in the Settings in your WordPress dashboard about it, so let’s do that now.

Set up your blog name.

Go to Settings > General.

Update your site title and tagline for a start, and add a site icon if you’ve created one already. (You can do that with Canva.)

Below, you’ll see the WordPress Address and Site Address of your site, but it will still have the http version of it.

Simply add an extra S there, (https) so WP can now treat the new secure domain you have as your site’s address. And save the changes.

Pick a new theme.

Your site now has one of the default WordPress themes and probably doesn’t look the way you want it to.

To change that, go to Appearance > Themes and click ‘Add Theme’.

Pick a theme you like and install it.

And that’s it. For now at least, because your blogging journey is just beginning.

But now you can begin customizing your WordPress theme and adding some content to the pages.

Let me know if you have any questions about the WordPress dashboard.