Fill in “Site Title” and “Tagline” (In Settings > General)

• Write your title in “Site Title”
• Explain what your site is about and why your site is unique in “Tagline”
• You don’t want your site branded as “just another WordPress site” (the default tagline)

Clean up Generic Content

• Delete the generic “Hello World!” post (In Posts > All Posts). This will also delete the generic Comment.
• Delete the generic “Sample Page” page (In Pages > All Pages).

Clean up Your Sidebars. (In Appearance > Widgets)

• Remove the Recent Posts, Archives, Categories and Meta widgets from your sidebars.
• If your theme has a Search box in the Header remove the Search widget. If your theme DOES NOT have a Search box in the header then keep the Search box widget and move it to the top of the sidebar.
• You can change the sidebar elements in Appearance > Widgets. Just drag and drop the ones you want to use and delete the ones you don’t.

Make your site visible to search engines (In Settings > Reading > Site Visibility)

• Make sure the “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” is ticked off
• Make sure your site is visible to everyone, including search engines
• Your site is visible to search engines by default but it has happened that bloggers ticked this box and were later wondering why search engines didn’t index their sites

Set-up social media accounts for Posting and Sharing

• Set up your social media accounts so you can share your Posts. (In Settings > Sharing)
• You can also add social media sharing icons that can appear below your Posts, Pages, in the Footer or on Sidebars.

Select a Theme (In Appearance > Themes)

• You may not want the WordPress default theme to be your main design theme.
• Find the theme you like and activate it. Some Themes will cost money.
• A Theme may allow you to add your own unique header image in Appearance > Header