Reading Settings

Video Transcript

The next section of our Settings panel is Reading. There are only a few items on this page, but they’re important to know about. As a matter of fact, one of the items is missing because we deleted that sample page that came installed with our new WordPress installation. So let’s head over to pages real quick and create a new tester page just to show you that additional feature in our Readings section. And we’ll cover all this stuff in more detail when we get to the video on creating pages.

Okay, now we’ve got our page created or we have a page created. Come on back to Settings and Reading. And now we have this feature that pops up that allows us to change how our front page looks – where it’s going to be displaying by default our latest post, like a blog page, or if we want to make that page a static page. And if we want to make it a static page, you can find out more about what that is by clicking this link here. But we simply select this radio button. And once we do that, from all of the pages that we have created right now, which is only that one, we can select which one of those in this drop-down section that we want to be our home page or our static front page. I use this a lot whenever I’m creating a sales page on one of my membership sites. I’ll make that sales page the static front page. And if I am going to have a set of blog posts, then I’ll go ahead and create another page and title it Blog or Check this Out or something to that effect, and then select that as my post page. And the blog post will then be displayed in chronological order on this page, from the newest post at the very top to the oldest post at the very bottom.

And this leads me into the next item here on our Readings Settings page, and that is the blog pages, show at most this number of posts. And by default, it’s set at 10. And it will take a lot longer for your page to load for your visitors the larger this number is. And there’s more items and speeding up the load time of your WordPress site that we’ll cover in an upcoming video. But this is one of those items that will affect the load time. So one thing you might consider doing, especially if you have a lot of images and long posts. You might want to knock this back to maybe 3 or 5.

And at the bottom of you blog post page, there will be clickable links that will direct your visitors to additional posts – be it older or newer posts. This just affects what’s going to be showing on the blog post page every time that it’s loaded up.

Now these next two items here will affect the RSS feeds and how they show in your visitors’ readers. And if you’re not sure what an RSS feed is, then you can head on over to codex.wordpress.org/wordpress_feeds to learn more about the WordPress Feeds and make that the capitalization is proper there. But you can adjust this number here. It’s going to show the most recent items in the syndication feed or RSS feeds. And you also are given the option to adjust the way the feed is shown, whether they’re only going to get a summary and a link to click through to the full blog post, or by default, they’re going to get the full text of that blog post in their RSS feed. There is some advantage to choosing the summary in that it can save some bandwidth. But it’s not a large amount. And again, you can learn a little bit more about this over here at the codex page related to WordPress Feeds.

And the last item on our Readings Panel page is the Search Engine Visibility option. And we briefly touched on this in our installation videos. But you can check this box to discourage search engines from indexing this site. And as I had mentioned then, I choose to check this box or to keep the search engines from indexing my site until I’m ready, until all the pages are set, until the graphics are the way that I like. And then I come back in here – again, that’s the Readings Panel page – and un-tick this box. So that tells the search engines, “Hey, come and get it.” So I’m going to check that box to discourage search engines from indexing this site.

Oh, and by the way, I just want to remind you that every single page on your Admin section, you can learn more about the items by checking out the Help dropdown section here. And in this example, you can learn more about search engine visibility by checking this link in the Help section. And it tells you a little bit more about it.

And like always, any adjustments you make here, be sure and click on Save Changes. Otherwise, you’re not going to take.
And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on the Readings panel of our Settings tab. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.