How to Configure General Settings of WordPress

October 20, 2021

When you start using WordPress, you’d usually begin branding your website to give it a personal touch. But where can you find the settings to configure your WordPress website?

No worries! Because I’ll walk you through the 8 features in the General Settings to configure your WordPress website. Before we begin, let me introduce you to the General Settings of WordPress!

Table of Contents

Introduction to WordPress General Settings

Compared to other settings pages that focus on specific categories, the General Settings page has a lineup of options for simple features like site title, tagline, date & time format, language, timezone, etc.

For Example:

Your site title and tagline play a vital role in branding and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). If the site title or tagline is displayed incorrectly, you might not rank well on Google search!

However, you can resolve this issue by simply writing a tagline/slogan relevant to your business and your site title as your business name, therefore making your site more searchable and ranking better in search engines!

Now that we know what to expect from the General Settings of WordPress – let’s dive in and learn about these features!

To access the General Settings on your WordPress dashboard, simply hover over Settings on the bottom left side of your screen, then click General.

Here, you will see that you can change things like the Site Title, Tagline, Administration Email Address, Site Language, Timezone, etc. Let’s start learning what each of these settings are and what they do!

Site Title & Tagline

The site title is mainly your website or blog. Your site title is usually placed on the top tab of web browsers, and some themes may use it as a header.

For the tagline, most people think of it as a slogan. But to be more realistic, it’s best to think of it as a brief description of what your site’s about.

WordPress Address (URL) & Site Address (URL)

The WordPress Address is the full URL of the directory that contains the WordPress core installation. To make it more simple, this is the address that shows where you installed WordPress!

Similar to the WordPress Address, the Site Address is simply the URL of your website.

Administration Email Address

The administration email address is obviously YOUR email address. WordPress also sends automated emails to the email address you set when there are any updates/changes on your website.

Membership

When you click/enable the checkbox to allow people to register, it will determine whether visitors can sign up for accounts on your site.

After you’ve enabled membership registrations, there are various roles that you can assign using the New User Default Role settings.

New User Default Role

The new user default role setting determines the initial permissions to all new users that sign up on your site. By default, the new user role will be set to Subscriber.

The subscriber role allows members to have access to their profiles only. You can even add additional administrators that have full access to everything we discuss in this article.

Site Language

The setting changes the language of your WordPress dashboard. Please bear in mind that it won’t translate your site’s content, themes, or plugins! Just your WordPress dashboard.

Timezone

Once you’ve selected a timezone for your site, the timezone will adjust the site’s clock, therefore affecting the timestamps on your posts and comments (including the date and time settings, making it very handy for scheduled posts.)

Date & Time Format

For the date & time format, you can control the way your dates are displayed on your site by choosing one of the predefined options or entering your own by using the custom field as shown.

Conclusion

In this blog, we learned about each feature in the General Settings and how to use them! However, there are multiple pages of settings for basic installation. But no worries, you usually need to do this before installing any plugins on WordPress.