The following checklist highlights the most important steps when publishing a WordPress webiste, that I do mysqlf and recommend to everyone else. By following this steps you will avoid common mistakes and make sure your website is ready for visitors.
Tip 1. Check Website Name and Description
A most common error that gets past even long-time developers is that they leave the default “My Blog” site title or “Just another WordPress site” description.
We often forget to replace the site name and as a result, it is indexed in the Google search results.
Using Google Dorking We can see that there are tens of thousands of websites that made this mistake:
In order to update the website name and description, log in to the wp-admin dashboard and change it under Settings > General
Tip 2. Enable Google Indexing
WordPress has a built-in feature that allows us to block ask Google not to index the site until it is ready, but often we forget to disable this feature so Google does not index the website at all.
In order to allow Google indexing, make sure “Search engine visibility” is unchecked under Settings > Reading
Tip 3. Verify site on Google Search Console
Google Search Console is one of the most powerful free tools that you can use for SEO. By verifying your website on GSC you will be able to see all pages that Google indexes on your wesbite and receive email notifications if there are problems.
One of the most important steps in SEO is to submit the Sitemap of the site to this tool, usually if the Yoast SEO plugin is installed on the site, it will create a sitemap for us which we can submit to Google.
Tip 4. Delete Dummy Content
WordPress comes with some demo content that we do not want on a live site, such as the “Hello world!” post, “Sample Page”, “Hi, this is a comment.” comment, Hello Dolly plugin, etc.
Premium themes also offer an option to import the demo content and make the theme look the same as on the demo website, providing you with a bunch of styles and texts to speed up your website development. However, most of the images and pages remain forever and simply take the space and show duplicate content in Google SearchConsole.
The good practice is to remove these unused images from the media library and remove leftover posts, pages, and other imported data.
Tip 5. Install an SEO plugin
The page title and meta description appear in the code of your page and in search engine results. They are very important in telling the search engines what the page is about. If your website automatically generates these meta elements for you, it’s likely that they are not well-optimized for search engines. This is where an SEO plugin steps in!
Plugins such as Yoast SEO allow you to specify Post Titles and descriptions per post base.
Most of them (should) also take care of generating an XML sitemap, creating robots.txt file, and setting .htaccess Canonical elements.
Tip 6. Setup SMTP for Email Deliverability
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is an industry-standard for sending emails. Proper SMTP configuration helps increase email deliverability by using authentication.
To specify which email account WordPress should use for sending all emails you need to add the login credentials for an email account either in code (your theme’s functions.php file or create a new plugin) or use an existing plugin such as WP Mail SMTP by WPForms.
For more information please visit this tutorial:
Tip 7. Optimize the website: Setup Caching
WordPress caching is the fastest way to improve performance.
Plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache, and Cache Enabler can be easily installed and will cache your WordPress posts and pages as static files. These static files are then served to users, reducing the processing load on the server. This can improve performance several hundred times over for fairly static pages.
When combined with a system-level page cache such as Varnish, this can be quite powerful.
Tip 8. Harden the website and prevent SPAM
There are some proven ways to stop spam in contact and comment forms, let’s see them one by one.
- Use a CAPTCHA plugin: reCAPTCHA, Custom CAPTCHA, or Cloudflare turnstile
- Use a spam-protection plugin such as SpamBee
- Use a Web Firewall like Cloudflare
Tip 9. 301 Redirects for new page names
Using a plugin such as Page Redirects or .htaccess file, make sure to permanently redirect all those pages that we renamed during the website development.
These redirects are very critical because if we don’t define them, there will be a lot of broken links (404) on the site, and what will happen is that the ranking of the site will hurt Google and little by little results Old ones will disappear from the search results.
For a few dozen redirects, I recommend adding the 301 redirect code directly into the .htaccess file:
Redirect 301 /old-page-name/ /new-page/If you have more redirects, consider using a plugin, such as Page Redirects:
Tip 10. Remove Inactive Plugins and Themes
By uninstalling plugins you no longer use, you can ensure that your website doesn’t accumulate files and data you don’t need. Apart from taking up space, these unused plugins and themes, also may slow down your website due to database bloat, or make the website more vulnerable because often those plugins are not updated.
When you should deactivate and when to uninstall plugins and themes?
WordPress has a convenient Deactivate option that disables the plugin, which is useful when we want to test the website without that particular plugin or temporarily deactivate it.
One additional step after permanently deleting a plugin is to remove its leftover data from the database: How to safely remove database tables after plugin deactivation
Tip 11. Set Alt Values for Images
Alt Values are useful for Accessibility and for Website promotion. By adding adding alt tags to your images in WordPress you can rank higher and get more visitors from Google.
To add an Alt tag to image, simply when editing the image add text in the Alt text (alternative text) field.
Here is a simple WordPress plugin that will automatically add the post title as the alt tag to featured images and other images in the post content improving traffic from search engines.
Tip 12. Turn Off unused WordPress features
WordPress comes with a wide variety of features that are not always usable on every site, so it is recommended to turn off the feature that is not usable for our site. For example, on a simple 5 page site that does not have a blog, I recommended disabling the comments.
Disable Emojis
If you do not plan to use emojis at all (😔😟😩😭😖) you can easily disable them by adding the following code to your theme functions.php file:
//Remove emojis support
remove_action('wp_head', 'print_emoji_detection_script', 7);
remove_action('wp_print_styles', 'print_emoji_styles');Remove RSS feed links
Also, if you’re not going to be using the blog, then you do not need the blog RSS feed:
// Remove RSS feed links
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );
remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 );Disable Auto-Generated Responsive Images
WordPress creates many different size images to help improve performance across different devices. This can really add to loading times and make the media library a mess. If you do your own custom image optimization for responsive you can disable this feature.
// disable generated image sizes
function shapeSpace_disable_image_sizes($sizes) {
unset($sizes['thumbnail']); // disable thumbnail size
unset($sizes['medium']); // disable medium size
unset($sizes['large']); // disable large size
unset($sizes['medium_large']); // disable medium-large size
unset($sizes['1536x1536']); // disable 2x medium-large size
unset($sizes['2048x2048']); // disable 2x large size
return $sizes;
}
add_action('intermediate_image_sizes_advanced', 'shapeSpace_disable_image_sizes');
// disable scaled image size
add_filter('big_image_size_threshold', '__return_false');
// disable other image sizes
function shapeSpace_disable_other_image_sizes() {
remove_image_size('post-thumbnail'); // disable images added via set_post_thumbnail_size()
remove_image_size('another-size'); // disable any other added image sizes
}
add_action('init', 'shapeSpace_disable_other_image_sizes');This code was provided by Jeff Starr from: Perishable Press
After disabling generation of these images, we should also remove the srcset attribute that is added to specify the image file URL to use for the different media sizes.
// Disable srcset for images
function disable_wp_responsive_images() {
return 1;
}
add_filter('max_srcset_image_width', 'disable_wp_responsive_images');Disable wp-embed script link
The wp-embed script is used for converting links to YouTube and SoundCloud players, so if you will not be using them, you can disable them:
// Remove wp-embed
add_action( 'wp_footer', function(){
wp_dequeue_script( 'wp-embed' );
});Disable Gutenberg Libraries
If you are not going to be using the Gutenberg Blocks editor, then there is no need to load these styles.
// Remove block library css
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', function(){
wp_dequeue_style( 'wp-block-library' );
} );Disable Commenting Libraries
To disable Commenting globally:
// Remove comment reply js
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', function(){
wp_dequeue_script( 'comment-reply' );
} );Tip 13. Update WP core, Theme and Plugins
Updating WordPress core versions, plugins and themes is a very important part, we must make sure that we upload a website that is fully updated, that all website code is updated and secure.
That is why it is recommended to update WordPress, plugins and the active theme we use as part of the process of uploading a WordPress site.
Tip 14. Test, test and Test some more
Conclusion
Publishing a website is an extensive process, and one can even argue that a website is never completelly finished bbecause there is always room for improvement. But if this is your first time publishing a WordPress website, all these steps will help you not make some of the same mistakes i did.
