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WordPress Basics

WordPress General Settings

Settings > General

WordPress General Settings page is where you edit the most important settings of your WordPress website such as your website URL, website Title, administrative email address, etc.

Available settings

These are the available settings in the WordPress General settings page.

Site Title

Your website title. Used for title tags and as a logo in the absence of an actual logo image.

Tagline

The tagline of your website. Some themes display it under the title.

WordPress Address (URL)

The root domain of your website. The directory where WordPress is installed.

If you change the WordPress Address for any purpose like applying SSL by rewriting HTTP to HTTPS, make sure that you also replace the internal links using a plugin like Better Search Replace or Velvet Blues Update URLs.

Site Address (URL)

The URL of your homepage. Leave it the same as the WordPress Address unless you want the website homepage to be different from the domain root.

Changing the above two settings can break your site. DO NOT change them unless you are sure that you want to change your website URL or homepage and can make it work.

Administration Email Address

The email address of the owner of the website. It is very important to provide a valid email address here. This is where you receive communications related to your WordPress website.

Membership

If you want to allow users to create accounts on your website, check the box. If not leave it as it is. Membership sites might want to enable this option. If you are not seeing the signup or login button provided by a theme or plugins, probably it is because this option is disabled.

New User Default Role

The default user role to assign to the newly created users. Subscriber is the default new user role. It is enough in most cases unless you want to provide specific capabilities to new users.

DO NOT change it unless you know what you are doing.

Site Language

The primary language of your website which WordPress will use to display information. If you change it, the WordPress backend language will change and everything including the settings page will be translated to the chosen language.

Timezone

The timezone you want WordPress to use. Useful for setting cron-jobs or scheduling posts on your local time instead of the standard universal time.

Date Format

The date format you want WordPress to use while displaying dates in the backend. The frontend formats may be different based on your theme or plugins.

Time Format

The time format you want WordPress to display for backend features. It may/may not reflect in the frontend based on your theme or plugins.

Week Starts On

The day in which WordPress starts counting the week. If you choose Monday, the week will start on Monday instead of the default, Sunday.