WordPress Settings

The Settings menu has the options which control the whole site. A wrong setting here can hide your site from visitors, so change it with care.

Settings > General

Here you set the basic details of the site.

  • Site Title and Tagline: name and short description of the site.
  • WordPress Address and Site Address (URL): the address of your site. Do not change them if you are not sure, the site can stop working.
  • Administration Email Address: where admin notices go.
  • Membership: allows anyone to register, and the default role of new users.
  • Timezone, Date Format, Time Format and Week starts on.

Many of these values are saved in the wp_options table, and you can read them with WP-CLI:

Terminal output

$ wp option get blogname
Demo Site
$ wp option get blogdescription
$ wp option get siteurl
http://example.com
$ wp option get users_can_register
0
$ wp option get default_role
subscriber
$ wp option get timezone_string
UTC

Settings > Writing

Default post category and post format, and the options for sending posts by email. Most of the time you do not need to change this page.

Settings > Reading

This is one of the most used pages:

  • Your homepage displays: your latest posts, or a static page. For a business website, choose a static page for the home page and another one for the blog.
  • Blog pages show at most: how many posts show on one page.
  • Search engine visibility: the box Discourage search engines from indexing this site. It is good for a site under development, but do not forget to turn it off when you launch.
Terminal output

$ wp option get show_on_front
posts
$ wp option get posts_per_page
10
$ wp option get blog_public
1

blog_public is 1 when search engines are allowed. If you see 0 on a live site, your site is asking the search engines to stay away.

Settings > Discussion

Controls comments: allow comments on new posts, ask commenters to give name and email, hold comments for moderation, and the avatar settings. See WordPress Comments.

Settings > Media

Sets the default image sizes. WordPress makes a copy of every uploaded image in these sizes.

Terminal output

$ wp option get thumbnail_size_w
150
$ wp option get medium_size_w
300
$ wp option get large_size_w
1024

Settings > Permalinks

Chooses the URL structure of posts. Read WordPress Permalinks.

Settings > Connectors and Privacy

Connectors is the place to connect external services to WordPress, such as AI providers, and it was added in WordPress 7.0. Privacy lets you choose or create your privacy policy page.

Note: Plugins also add their own pages under Settings. If you do not use a plugin anymore, remove it so the menu stays clean.

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