Category: WordPress • Est. reading time: 2 minutes
Settings > Reading decides what visitors see the moment they land on your site, and how your content gets served out to readers and feed apps. There is one setting on this screen that hides more launched-but-invisible websites than any other, so stick with us to the end.
The Fields
Your homepage displays. Choose Your latest posts for a blog-style feed, or A static page to use a specific page as your homepage, which is what most businesses want. The static option also lets you pick a separate page for your blog posts.
Blog pages show at most and Syndication feeds show the most recent. How many posts appear on a listing page and in your RSS feed. Ten is a sensible default for both.
For each post in a feed, include. Choose Excerpt to send only a preview through your feed, which nudges readers to click through and makes life harder for content scrapers.
Search engine visibility. The big one. Checking “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” politely asks Google to ignore you. It often gets switched on during a build and then left checked at launch. Therefore, double check it before going live.
Read this twice: if your live site is nowhere on Google, this checkbox is the first place to look. After launch, make sure it is unchecked.
Want a Hand With This?
Getting found starts with small settings like this. Learn the whole picture in our live, one-on-one classes at allydrez.com/learn-how-to-use-wordpress, or reach us at support@allydrez.com or 1-321-209-2004.