Settings has seven sub-items. Most of them are set once, but two can create a problem that is hard to track down.
General
Site Title and Tagline. They appear in the browser and sometimes in search results. If it still says “Just another WordPress site” — change it now.
WordPress Address and Site Address. Usually both the same. Don’t touch these unless you know exactly what you are doing — a wrong value means a website nobody can reach, not even through the admin.
Administration Email Address. This is where update and password-reset notices go. It must be an address you actually read.
Membership. “Anyone can register” — off, unless you need it. Switched on and forgotten, it is a common source of spam accounts.
Timezone. Choose your own city (Skopje, if you are in North Macedonia). Otherwise scheduled posts go out at the wrong time.
Writing
The default category for new posts, and posting via email (an old feature, rarely used).
The least important tab.
Reading — this is where the two dangerous ones are
Home page. You choose whether the website opens with the blog or with a static page. For a business website — static.
How many posts per page. Ten is reasonable.
⚠️ “Discourage search engines from indexing this site”
This box is ticked while the website is being built, so that it doesn’t show up unfinished in Google.
And many people forget to untick it. The website is finished, it works, and Google doesn’t see it for months.
If your website doesn’t appear in search — check this first. It is the most common cause, and the easiest to fix.
Discussion
Everything about comments.
For a business website, the most practical choice: switch them off. Untick “Allow people to submit comments on new posts”.
That applies to new posts. For existing ones, change it in bulk via Posts → select all → Edit.
If you keep them on: tick “Comment must be manually approved”. Otherwise spam arrives within days.
Media
The sizes WordPress creates automatically. The defaults are reasonable.
One thing worth knowing: untick “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders” if you want simpler addresses. But only on a new website — on an existing one it breaks the links.
Permalinks — the second important one
This decides what your addresses look like.
The default may be ?p=123 — unreadable and bad for search.
Choose “Post name” — then the address is /how-to-register-mk-domain/.
⚠️ Don’t change this on an existing website without redirects. All the old addresses die — links from other websites, shares, Google results. If you must, you need a redirect plugin.
A small detail: this is also where you fix a 404 error after a migration. Go here and just click “Save Changes” — WordPress creates a new .htaccess.
Privacy
You choose which page is your privacy policy. WordPress also has a draft you can use as a starting point.
Set it even if the page already exists — some plugins link to it automatically.
The two worth checking right now
- Reading → is “discourage search engines” unticked
- Permalinks → is it set to “Post name”
That is two minutes, and it solves problems people spend months looking for.
Don’t want to maintain WordPress yourself — updates, backups and security? We take care of it.
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