In this tutorial, we’ll talk about website tagline, permalink structure, and favicons. We’ll mention the comment section once again, categories, of course, widgets, the sidebar, home page, your username, and Gravatars. We’ll talk about plugins, themes, cache, and some more.

Before we get started, let’s take a minute to cover why is such a list important.

When you install your WordPress, the CMS is ready for you to make whatever website you want to create. That’s why some of the predefined settings will not serve you well. On top of that, some of them might even harm you in the long run, should you overlook them.

Although we’ve created an in-depth tutorial on how to create a website with WordPress, there are several small yet important steps that you need to take before launching your website.

1. Set Up Your Site Title & Tagline

Your website has its domain name. And the latter is the name by which people will know your website. But, of course, you could use an abbreviation in the domain name, so there should be a way to tell people what it means.

Here comes the website name. Although the name and the Tagline of your website, you should write while installing WordPress, the hype of creating your website, might have taken over you, which is one of the reasons why you can change the name and the tagline of your WordPress website.

Thus the first thing you need to do, once you’ve installed the CMS is to check whether the name and the tagline of your website are correctly written.

2. Set Your Timezone, Date, and Time Format

The timezone of your website is very important as WordPress uses it to determine when to publish scheduled posts.

To change the timezone of your website, go to Settings » General and look for the options Timezone, Date, and Time Format.

While there, you can use the Date and Time format settings to change the way they’re displayed on your website.

3. Permalink Structure

We’ve talked about permalinks before. They are crucial for the experience that people will have on your

website, and the ease they will or will not feel while being there.

This is true, as the permalink is what we need to write in the browser’s address bar when we want to

enter a specific page on a website. By default, WordPress has kinda messy permalink settings. Good thing

there is an easy way to fix them. Go to Settings -> Permalinks, and make them as short and

understandable as possible. Changing your permalink structure is one of the WordPress SEO Essentials.

4. Upload a Favicon

Favicons are an easy way to make your website stand out in the address bar of your website visitors.  You ought to add a favicon. Otherwise, you’ll get the default browser. They are rarely flattering.

Since WordPress’ version is 4.3, we can easily add a favicon. To do so, we need to go to the WordPress dashboard. Go to Appearance -> Customize ->Site Identity tab.

Once there, click on the select file button and upload the image you want to use as a site icon. The icon should be at least 512 pixels wide and tall.

5. Choose Your Discussion Settings

Are you going to let people comment under your content?

If so, how are you going to protect your website from spam?

In WordPress, we can do pretty much anything, with pretty much everything. You can, for example,  disable the comment section all along. On the other hand, you might want to have a comment section. But having one comes with the obligation of stopping the spam on your website for you, and your visitors’ sake.

The settings of your comment section, you can find in your WordPress dashboard, under the Settings tab, and then Discussion.

Related: How to Add Facebook Comments in WordPress

6. Remove Sample Content

To show off its main capabilities and to let people know what it is meant for, WordPress comes with a few predefined pages, one of which, is a Privacy Policy. You might want to save that. The others you will never need.

As all of this content is created for you to get to know the CMS, which you don’t need, as you followed our tutorial on how to create your own website with WordPress, you can go to the All Pages, page, bulk select them, and click delete. Do the same on the All Posts page.

Don’t forget to remove them from the trash as well. You won’t need those posts.

7. Create a Home Page

What page do you want your website visitors to see, once they land on your website? Do you want to show the latest posts or do you prefer something different, like a business introduction?

One of the most important actions, you need to take, once you’ve installed your WordPress website is to define the homepage. Contrary to the expectations, creating a page, and naming it Home, won’t do it.

Check out the following article to find out how to set a home page in WordPress

8. Create a Custom Menu

Ok, this one is not something you need to do right after you’ve installed WordPress. Still, we think it is one of the most basic steps we need to take when building a website. Thus, creating a custom menu is a step that found its place in this list.

To add a custom menu to your website, you ought to direct yourself to Appearance -> Menu.

Related: How does the WordPress Menu Work

Creating a custom menu, as you can guess, is among the most important actions, as it directly affects the look and feel of your website. Where the latter is glued to the user experience.

You can see where this is going.

Take care of your website’s menu.

9. Change Default Admin User

When you install WordPress, the user name that is used for the installation is sometimes fixed to “admin”. Of course, using this user name is not recommended, as if someone decides to try and enter your website, he already has the username.

We would highly recommend you not only change the default username but secure your WordPress Admin Panel.

To change the user, you’ll have to create a new one with administrative rights and delete the default one.

This whole operation could be done in the Users  -> All Users section.

10. Get a Gravatar

While reading articles on WordPress websites all over the web, you can see that some people use their photos in the comments section, and if you are lucky enough, you might see the same person commenting on more than one website. This would probably be the moment where you ask yourself, whether this person has an account on both of these websites. The simple answer is no. He, as everybody who has a custom photo in the WordPress comment section, is using Gravatar. An acronym for Global Avatar.

To experience WordPress fully, you might want to Add a Gravatar.

11. Delete Unused Default Plugins

The preinstalled content in WordPress is all over the place. Pages, posts, themes, and plugins.

Pretty much whenever they could, they put a sample content so that the absolute WordPress Beginners won’t feel lost.

Most often than not, we get to delete these plugins. We don’t need them.

12. Add the Plugins That You Will Need

Once you’ve removed the content that you won’t need, you ought to start adding the one that you will.

If you already know what functionalities you want on your website, you might as well start searching for and installing the plugins that will let you add these features to your website.

13. Choose Your Theme

While with plugins, you might take the approach most comfortable to you, when it comes to the themes in WordPress, you need first to choose, and install the theme that you want to use.

As the theme is the core of your website’s design, it is impossible to have a WordPress website without a theme. Thus, before you proceed to delete all the preinstalled themes, you need to choose the one you will use.

The design that you are about to choose depends on several different factors, among which are:

• What styles do you need
• The customizability of the theme
• Are you willing to pay for a premium design
• Personal preferences

If you want the theme of your website to be one that you won’t need to change soon, look around for a nicely designed theme that is being frequently updated by its developer’s team.

14. Delete Unused Themes

You are almost there.

After all these important things you’ve done after installing WordPress, there are a few actions left.

Now that you have the plugins and most importantly, the theme that you are about to use on your website, you can delete the unused themes. Most often than not, those themes are just the twenty-something default themes of the CMS.

Deleting the preinstalled themes of your website will make it a bit smaller, and just a tiny bit more secure.

Related: How to Delete a WordPress Theme

15. Create a Child Theme

Speaking of themes and security, you have to create a child theme. Doing so will protect your customizations from being lost, if and when the theme that you’ve chosen gets updated.

The easiest way to create a child theme is by using a plugin. It is a pretty straightforward process, and it won’t take a lot of time for you to achieve good results.

If you are about to add additional CSS to your website, thus, further customizing your website, it is mandatory for you to create a child theme to protect your code from being erased with the next update of your WordPress theme.

16. Set up Caching Settings

One of the reasons the web, and the technology as a whole is as fast as it is, is cache.

The fact that your website is not fully loaded when someone visits it has its positive and negative sides. It both makes your website a lot faster, but on the other hand, makes it possible for the website to show the old content, as it doesn’t reload, but shows a cached version.

To avoid “bad caching”(where your newest content is not shown to users), you need to tune up the caching settings of your WordPress website.

You might, of course, want to publish your website without adding a cache plugin at all. In most cases, that would be a mistake, as caching allows your users to visit the site faster, and makes them comfortable enough to stay longer. On the contrary, the lacking of caching on your website, often makes it load for so much time that people often leave before the page is fully painted.

Conclusion

WordPress is a versatile, and thus, complex system. There are a lot of things that might be taken into account while building a website with it. The list above, of course, does not cover everything. Still, all of the points mentioned are mandatory for every website that you create with WordPress (without number 10, perhaps).

Follow this list, and the building of your website be a lot more effortless.

The post 16 Things You Need to Do Right After You’ve Installed WordPress appeared first on AwardSpace.com.

Adding a bit of additional CSS to the stylesheet of your child theme is the best, and easiest way to customize your website.

But before we can do that, let’s get to know CSS.

What is CSS

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. What is implied in the name of this coding language is that first, it takes care of the styles of your website. This means that you’ll be able to change the look, color, and position of different objects along with your website.

And, second, these sheets, are cascading. That is to say if you’ve added different styles of the same object, the one at the bottom of the sheet will take place, as it is the last change made to the object in question.

There are a number of ways to learn CSS. Although, WordPress is a fairly simple CMS, knowing CSS will only help you in your website creation journey. You can start learning the programming language in W3Schools’ CSS course.

Why You Need to Add Additional CSS to WordPress

As it was suggested above, adding additional CSS will only help your website look and feel more like you want it to.

In WordPress, we use themes to define the appearance of a website. And as themes are created for the general public, and for our website specifically, we ought to either:

• Find the perfect theme – one that has the customization options that we need, a design that we like and want to use, and colors that are similar to our logo’s color palette
• Change our logo and main brand colors in accordance with the theme that we like.
• Tweak a theme, the design of which we enjoy to fit our website’s identity.

Although, the first two also work as a solution, most often than not, changing the theme in accordance with what we feel about our brand is the most correct approach.

The theme, after all, is just a tool, your brand is not.

To make a certain theme correspond to your ideas, you need to add additional CSS.

How to add Additional CSS to WordPress

It is really easy to add additional CSS to your WordPress website.  There are two main methods to do so. Each of them, of course, has its positive and negative sides, as they are adding the code in different places on your website.  We’ll cover both of them, so you can decide which one is better for you and which one you’ll use.

Method 1: Adding Custom CSS Using the Theme Editor

If you want to add additional CSS to your WordPress, we recommend you to use this method, as this way you’ll be adding the code directly in the main CSS file. Namely, styles.css. This is important, as like we mentioned, CSS is being read from the browsers from the top to the bottom. This means that the changes made at the bottom are overwriting those above.

Therefore, if you add the changes in the theme customizer instead of the editor you won’t have any control over whether the code is read from the browser before or after the rest of the CSS.

Something else, which is as important as your choice of where to add your CSS, is the fact that if you choose to go for the main style.css file, you ought to create a child theme for your WordPress.

Doing so will protect your custom CSS changes when the theme you are using gets updated.

To add additional CSS to your website, you should go to your WordPress dashboard. Once there, locate the Appearance option in the sidebar menu, hover over it and look for the Theme Editor at the bottom.  What you should look for is the following:

When you click on the Theme Editor, you’ll be redirected to the theme editor page, where you can start customizing your website by adding the CSS that you need or want.

This is the theme editor page. Here is all the CSS that styles the theme that you are using. In the upper right corner, you can change the theme to which the changes will apply. In the lower-left corner is the update button, which you need to click once you’ve made the changes in order to save them.

Method 2: Adding Custom CSS Using Theme Customizer

The second method of adding CSS to customize your website is by using the so-called built-in CSS editor. The latter you can reach by going to the Theme Customizer.

To find the Theme Customizer, you’ll need, once again, to go to the admin panel of your website. Once there hover the Appearance button in your sidebar menu, and look for Customize.

When you choose to Customize you’ll be redirected to the front end of your website. But with a tweak. On the left-hand side of your display, you’ll see a number of options to customize your website. Among these options is the one for Additional CSS.

Open it, and start writing the code you need to customize your website the way you want.

The post How to Add Additional CSS to WordPress and Further Customize Your Website appeared first on AwardSpace.com.

What is WordPress Page

In WordPress, pages are(mostly) static pieces of information about you, your website, your business, or your blog. Such pieces of info could be, but are not limited to, About Page, Contact Page, and Home Page. Of course, Privacy Policy, Terms of Services, etc.

Related: How to set a Home Page to a WordPress Website

On the other hand, posts are the refreshing pieces of information that you see published one after the other in an order that shows the newest ones on the top and the oldest at the bottom of the range.

In other words, if you have a News website based on WordPress, pages ought to be the Home Page of your website, the contact, etc., while posts will be the news articles themselves.

And as you can see, most websites, except those that don’t have any refreshing pieces of information, ought to have both pages and posts.

Related: How to Define a Blog Page to WordPress

How to Add Page in WordPress

First things first, once you’ve installed your WordPress, you need to figure out how many and what pages you’ll need for your website to be what you want it to be.

Once you are figured out what pages you are about to create, you can enter the Admin Panel of your newly created website in order to be able to create them. If you are entering a WordPress Dashboard for the first time, you can stop and look around. On the left side of what you see, search for the Pages option.  If you hover over it with your mouse, you’ll be able to see two options.

Namely, All Pages, and Add New.

We are looking to see this:

When you click the Add New button, you’ll be redirected to where the magic happens, and you’ll be able to add a Page to your website. If you are using the Gutenberg editor, which comes as default to all WordPress versions after the 5.0 “Bebo”

Here, you can give your page a name, and add featured images, or images in the content. You can, of course, add the content that you want to be on this page.

To recap how to add a Page in WordPress:

1. Go to Your WordPress dashboard
2. Hover Pages
3. Click Add New
4. Add the information that you need on the page
5. Click Publish in the top right corner.

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As you can imagine, it is not that a website without a logo is not as functional as it would be with it. The logo is a simple little thing that makes your users believe more in you, your website and your opinions, hopefully, shared with them in a blog or in another way.

How to Add Logo to a WordPress Header

Hopefully, you already know how to add and edit the menu on the WordPress website, which is placed in the header, and around which we ought to orientate the size and the location of the logo.

There is a default way of adding a logo to your WordPress website, which is valid with most themes. However, there are themes that have taken a different approach to this otherwise easy task. Either way, adding a logo is usually located on the theme customizing page. The difference comes from the fact that some themes have not only the default theme customizer of WordPress but their own, as well. And if you are not able to find the header and navigation options in the Default theme customizer (which we’ll cover in a second) you ought to search for them on the theme’s options page. Whichever the theme.

Now that we got that out of the way, here is how to add a logo to a WordPress Header. Follow these steps:

1. Enter WordPress Dashboard.
2. Find Appearance in the left sidebar menu
3. Hover over it, and look for the Customize option
4. Click

5. You’ll be redirected to the Theme Customizer – the front end of your website will be accompanied by a left-located sidebar menu.

6. Look for “Site Identity” or “Header and Navigation”
7. Click “Site Identity” (if this is the one your theme has)
8. Select your logo.

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Once your website is created and you start getting to know the basics of WordPress, you’ll probably find out that the Classic Editor, as well as the block builder, known as Gutenberg, both have the option to go from ‘Visual’ to ‘Text’ editor. The latter is named “Code Editor” in the versions of WordPress after 5.0 when the Gutenberg Editor was added to the mix.

What is the WordPress Text Editor (now Code Editor)

Although the main reason people are using WordPress is the lack of necessity of code proficiency, there are sometimes, occasions when you need to add a little snippet of code or edit a little bit of HTML.

Knowing HTML and CSS, will, of course, highly improve your WordPress skills, but being amateur in website creation and maintenance is one of the main “selling points” of the CMS. Naturally, a lot of developers and other types of web services use WordPress for their websites, out of convenience. It is just easier than every other option.

Back to the Text Editor.

In a word, the text editor is a code editing tool, integrated into WordPress, where you can add, remove, or edit the code of your page or post.

When using the text editor, contrary to the Visual Editor, you need to be very cautious of what you are adding or removing, as an HTML tag that is not closed, could spoil the whole page. Your content, of course, will stay in place, the problem will be with its visualization to your website’s users.

Thus, if you are not sure what you are doing, use the visual editor of WordPress, or start learning HTML and CSS basics, which, in the long run, will be highly beneficial.

How to Enter the Text Editor

If you are using the Classic Editor (which could be achieved by the plugin Classic Editor, or if you haven’t upgraded your WordPress), you can find the Text editor on your Post/Page creation page. The Text button is located on the right top corner of your WYSIWYG.

Now, it is really important for us to mention that using an old version of WordPress, surely may create severe security risks. We’ve already covered why and how to keep your WordPress version up to date, which is an article we highly recommend you to read if you haven’t updated your WordPress in a while.

On the other hand, if you have updated, and have installed the plugin we’ve mentioned (Classic Editor), here is where you can find the text editor:

On the other hand, if you prefer using the Gutenberg Editor, you’ll have the option to Enter the now-called “Code Editor” with a combination of keys. Namely, Ctrl + Alt + Shift + M.

Or, you can go to the three dots on the top right corner of the page, and look for Code Editor.

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But what about underlining text in WordPress?

Although not recommended, as the web is a whole new channel, and people often think that an underlined text is a link to another page, depending on the type of your content, or what you are about to underline, doing so might have a very positive impact on the comprehension of your content.

Good thing, the CMS has several text formatting options by default. Thus, you won’t have to add any plugin to your website to simply underline some text.

Why Underline a Text in a Website?

While, our general advice to you is not to underline any text that is not a link, sometimes there are perfectly understandable reasons for you to want to do that.

In general, underlining is used to make a specific word stand out, but since links in websites are so common, as mentioned, for the users, it would be hard to identify whether an underlined text is a link or not.

What is more, WordPress has simple, perfectly utilizable, and well-known solutions to the text that stand out a problem. To so-called blockquote is sure one of them.

Yet, sometimes you might want to make part of a bolded, italicized, or blockquote text to stand out. Maybe it is a single word with great importance, or maybe it is just the word where you want the attention to go.

Either way, you can underscore that(those) word(s), just to make sure that the attention is going where you want it.

How to Underscore Text in WordPress

WordPress’ WYSIWYG works a lot like any other text editing software. Like, say Microsoft’s word.

And although in Word, you can clearly see a U symbol, that lets you know that this is where you need to click to underline a part of the text, and in WordPress, such a symbol does not exist, the so-called hotkeys for the action are absolutely the same.

In both text editors, what you need to do in order to underline a part of the text is to mark what you want to underscore, and just click Ctrl+U.

NB! Bear in mind that even WordPress is not “hiding” the feature without any reason. Underscoring text on a website is a practice that is not very user-friendly. There are very specific situations in which you might want to do so, but even if you think it is perfectly fine to underline a part of the text, think twice before doing it.

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This topic is, of course, the WordPress widgets.

Related: What is WordPress Widget?

As we’ve mentioned, the widgets are a small content container that adds various functionalities to your WordPress widget areas(also explained in our What is WordPress Widget article).

Let’s find out how to add and use Widgets in.

Why Do You Need to Use Widgets in WordPress?

Widgets are a convenient way of adding functions to a specific place on your website. Especially if you are a WordPress beginner. Widgets will present you with an easy way to add quotes, popular posts, recent posts, searches, and other dynamic items to your WordPress site.

To manage Widgets, you need to go to Appearance -> Widgets in your WordPress admin area.

On the left half of the page, you’ll see all the available widgets. They could and would change when you add a plugin that has available widgets.

On the right half of the screen, are located the widget areas in which you’ll be able to put the widgets. What type and how many widget areas you have is determined by the WordPress theme that you are using.

NB! Be careful when you are changing the theme of your WordPress website, as doing so may result in lack of a widget area that you and your users find useful and important.

Adding Widget to a Sidebar in WordPress

As always, to add a widget to the sidebar, as well as any other widget area, there are a number of possible approaches. The one that will take the least amount of effort is to simply drag and drop the desired widget in the desired widget area.

Another way to achieve the same result is to click on the desired widget, which will prompt a drop menu to show. In this menu, you’ll be able to choose the widget area where you want the desired block to go.

You can also add widgets using the live preview by visiting Appearance » Customize.

How to Remove a Widget in WordPress?

To remove a widget that you’ve added, you’ll have to once again go to the widget managing page. Appearance -> Widgets.

Find the widget area, where the widget you want to remove is located. Now find the widget. Click on the widget you want to remove. You’ll see that as when you’ve added them, the widget unfolds so you can see its options.

Below the setting, you’ll be able to see a link that says Delete.

NB! Deleting a widget will not only remove it from your sidebar (or other widget areas), but will also remove any options that you’ve selected, or changes you’ve made. To remove a widget without losing your changes, you need to drag and drop it in the inactive widgets section, which you’ll find at the left bottom corner of the same page.

You can add as many widgets from one type as you wish.

Say, you want two, three, or four ´custom HTML’ widgets in your sidebar. You can do that.

What is more important, even if you delete or list a widget as inactive, you’ll be always able to add another one from the same or another type.

The post How to Add and Use Widgets on Your WordPress Website appeared first on AwardSpace.com.

In short:

• A widget area is a container for various types of content
• A widget, on the other hand, is a smaller container that is dedicated to a particular function

As we mentioned, some themes are adding extra widget areas on top of the default number that WordPress has. Those extra widget areas could be on the home page, a particular post type, etc.

Generally, the widget areas that you’ll have by default are the Sidebar, and one to four-footer widget areas.

Not only widget areas, but widgets as well could be added by a theme or a plugin. Some of the default WordPress widgets are Categories, Tag cloud, Search, etc.

Some WordPress Widgets offer customization and options such as forms to fill out, including or excludes data and information, optional images, and other customization features.

To add or edit widgets to your website, you need to go to Appearance -> Widgets. Once there, you can easily drag and drop the widgets you want to add or remove.

The post What is Widget in WordPress appeared first on AwardSpace.com.

Not only that but featured images are what catch our attention when we see a shared website link in the social media’s newsfeeds. Therefore, without a featured image, the articles that you are writing and sharing will look dull and boring.

To avoid these results, you need to add a featured image to every post that you are creating and to every page that your website has.

Related: How to Add Facebook Like Box to Your WordPress Website

What is a WordPress Featured Image

The fact that we maintain WordPress Tutorials is not just a mere chance. It is a conscious decision that we made. WordPress is the most famous and used CMS that exists for a reason.  When the CMS was built, of course, it wasn’t as great as it is today. Still, WordPress manages to maintain its course along with the internet, and the devoted developers of the former never leave the users of the CMS needing something that WordPress doesn’t offer.

The featured image is often a neglected factor, and rather when we can use one as easy as it is in WordPress, we take it for granted.

Featured images are also known as post thumbnails. They are used to represent your posts, and pages when they are shared on the web. And when looking at the page, you defined as a blog page; the posts will be represented by the same image.  You can see how important it is to add featured images to your blog posts.

How to Choose a Featured Image in WordPress

Choosing a featured image in WordPress is a straightforward process. What you need to do is to go to the page or post where you want to add a featured image to, and once your content is ready to be published (or before that if you feel like it) scroll down the page and look at the right sidebar.

Click the Set featured image link, and choose the one that you feel is most relevant to your article.

Click Publish or Update(if the article was already published) and you are good to go.

Related: How to Add Media in WordPress Posts

How to Set a Default Featured Image in WordPress

Every once in a while, you’ll feel the need(or find the value) of setting a default image for your website to be represented, when the page or the post doesn’t have a featured image set.

To add a default image in WordPress, you’ll need a bit of coding. But don’t worry! It’s not as scary, as it sounds. Believe me; I am scared of the word code itself. Plus, in the next section of this article, I’ll walk you through a method of adding a default featured image in WordPress by using a plugin, which will make it a lot easier.

First of all, naturally, you need to create or choose an image that you want your website to show every time that it is shared online, but there is no featured image set to this page or post.

Then go to your WordPress Hosting Control Panel and look for the File manager.

Once there, enter yourwebsite.com/wp-content/themes/themename/Images and upload the image you’ve chosen. If such a directory doesn’t exist (which is highly probable), you can simply create it.

WordPress themes are displaying the post thumbnails in various places. To find the file, where you want to post the code, you need to look for the_post_thumbnail() function in the theme files.

More often than not, this function is in archive.php, single.php, or the content templates.

Next, you need to add the following code where you want to display the post thumbnail.

<?php if ( has_post_thumbnail() ) { the_post_thumbnail(); } else { ?><img src=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/images/default-featured-image.jpg” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?>” /><?php } ?>

Don’t forget to replace default-featured-image.jpg with your image file name.

Now everything should be working, and your posts should have a default featured image.

Setting a Default Featured Image in WordPress via Plugin

 There are a lot of ways to specify an image to be a default feature on your WordPress website.  The easiest, of course, is by adding a WordPress plugin and using its options to achieve the results you want.

One of the possible solutions is this plugin which will help you do that. But this is its main function, and as the usage of a vast number of plugins is not recommended, let’s try another solution.

Yoast SEO is a plugin that we’ve talked about before. And it is a really handy plugin.

In our Yoast for Beginners Guide, we’ve covered a lot of its capabilities, but we didn’t speak of this one. Yoast is granting you with the option to add a default open graph image, that will show when you are sharing your content on the social networks. More specifically Facebook.

To do so, you need to enter your WordPress Admin Panel. Once there, look for the Yoast SEO in the left sidebar menu. In the sidebar, it says just SEO with Yoast’s logo before that.

Go to Social->Facebook.

Click the Upload Image button, and choose the image you want to be a default featured image for every page or post that you share on the social network.

Then click the Save Settings button below. You are good to go.

Now you have a default featured image. When you are sharing your posts on Facebook, even if you forget or deliberately didn’t add a featured image (which will be shown in the post as well), you’ll have an image that will drive more users to click on your posts, and to read them.

The post WordPress Featured Images appeared first on AwardSpace.com.

The reasons for removing a plugin in WordPress can vary. One reason might be to install a different version of the plugin that is more secure and updated on a regular basis. Another could be to keep the WordPress environment clean and running smoothly – having multiple plugins can cause a significant load and can also decrease your website’s performance.

AwardSpace offers its WordPress Hosting users various options for deactivating a plugin in their content management system. Below we’ve summarized the most commonly used ones:

• via WordPress Admin Panel
• through FTP
• via phpMyAdmin

If you are unsure which method for uninstalling an add-on to use, please continue reading this article until you find the option that best suits your needs.

Uninstalling a plugin via WordPress Admin Panel

One of the most convenient and easiest methods to uninstall a plugin in WordPress is through the dashboard. The uninstall process is extremely easy and takes only a few clicks. You do not need any coding skills to disable a WordPress plugin.

To uninstall a plugin, please kindly follow the steps outlined hereunder:

1. 1. Enter WordPress admin panel.
   2. After a successful login, navigate to the Plugins menu and click Installed Plugins.
   3. WordPress will display a list of installed plugins. Look through the plugins list and find the one that is no longer needed.
   4. Click the Deactivate button next to the plugin that you would wish to disable.

 

1. 1. Once the request has been submitted, please allow WordPress some time to process it.

 

1. Once the plugin is Deactivated click on the Delete button to uninstall it.

If the uninstall process is successful, you will get a Plugin that was successfully deleted response from the server.

 

Uninstall a plugin through FTP

Another way to remove a WordPress plugin is with the use of an FTP client program through our built-in File Manager. If you prefer to use your FTP program, please see our complete guide on how to establish an FTP connection to the FTP server.

After you establish a successful connection, navigate to the /wp-content/plugins directory on your server. Right-click on the plugin that you would like to be disabled and press Delete.

 

If you would like to only disable the plugin click on Rename and enter a new name for your plugin’s directory (e.g. Akismet. disabled) and click the green checkmark.

 

At this point, the selected plugin should no longer be functioning and should appear inactive in your dashboard. To see if this is the case, log back into the admin area of your WordPress blog and check the status of the add-on in the Installed Plugins section.

 

Disabling a plugin via phpMyAdmin

Another way to deactivate a plugin in WordPress is through phpMyAdmin.

Log in to phpMyAdmin using WordPress’s MySQL username and password. Information on how to access a database is available in our Database Manager article.

Once connected to the MySQL server, phpMyAdmin will populate a list of database tables. Click on the one named wp-options (it would normally appear under the wp-links table).

 

Find the row labeled active_plugins and click on the Edit button next to it to enter the editor.

 

Once inside the editor, look at the option_value to identify the add-on name. Select all of the content related to the plugin (for example, i:1;s:29:”plugin-name/plugin-name.php”;) and remove it. Additionally, you will need to lower the value of a:X by one. Finally, press Go.

 

Why should a plugin be disabled?

There are many reasons for which you might want to disable instead of uninstalling the WordPress plugin. For example, a plugin is preventing your website from working properly. In order to identify the plugin causing the issue, you need to disable your plugins one by one. Once you have identified the problematic plugin you can leave it disabled until you have resolved the problem. Another reason would be if your plugin is outdated and you need to disable it until it receives an update. Outdated plugins often contain exploits and become the target of abusers to attack your website. Also when you disable the plugin you keep its configuration saved. This way when you decide to re-activate the plugin you will not have to go through the configuration process again.

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