10 Things You Need to Do Right After Launching a WordPress Site

Ive just  launched my new WordPress site Now what? youre thinking.So your site is finally  available to the world, and thats great! You can start using it to further your goals, and eventually grow your blog/business/portfolio or whatever else your desire is.But there are still a handful of things that you should do right after launching a WordPress site to set yourself up for success:1. Make sure youre visible to search enginesThe no.1 thing you need to do is allow Google to index your WordPress site.Even though in most cases WordPress sets this up correctly on its own during install, checking if things are in order can never hurt.Just go to your wp-admin,  then Settings / Reading.Look for Search Engine Visibility and make sure that the checkbox labeled Discourage search engines from indexing this site remains  unchecked:2. Integrate your  site with Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is a tracking and marketing tool that every website owner should use.It tracks your audienc e and their actions on your site. It comes with detailed information about everything  related to your sites content and visitors, such as the most viewed pages, conversion rates, the number of visits per day, in-depth user profiles, bounce rates, and lots of other essential stats.The tool is free and can be easily integrated with your WordPress site through an embed code provided by Google. Alternatively, you can use a plugin like Google Analytics by MonsterInsights.3. Activate cachingSpeed is one of the keys to keeping your visitors on the site. Who likes to wait for a page to load, right? No one!In fact,  if a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of people abandon it, according to Kissmetrics.How to avoid this?One solution is to install a caching plugin to reduce the overall page loading times. There are free caching plugins out there, for instance  W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache.Caching is a fairly complicated process, but to simplify it a bit, its about fetching the dynamic output of a WordPress site, storing it in the cache, and then serving it to every new visitor from that cache, instead of asking WordPress to generate it anew. Doing it this way takes a lot less time.4. Get yourself a CDNAnother recommended step is to hook your site up to a CDN service (Content Delivery Network). A CDN is a solution that takes the content from your site and stores it on a network of servers around the world. Then, when a visitor comes to your site, they get served from the location thats nearest to them. Hence, they can see your site much quicker than they would otherwise.Some of the most popular CDNs include:  MaxCDN, CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront. (If you want something free, its  CloudFlare.)5. Install a backup pluginBackup plugins will keep your site content in a safe place, in case anything bad ever happens and you need to restore your site to a previously working state.I really cant emphasize this enough. Backup plugins are truly invaluable!On e of the better and extremely affordable solutions right now is the Personal subscription to the Jetpack plugin. For the low price of $3.50 / month you get daily backups, one-click restores, spam filtering, and 30-day backup archive.6. Improve the  security of your siteTheres a lot of bad things that can happen to a WordPress site hacker  attacks, malware, viruses, etc. Protecting your website from all that with a firewall of some kind is always a good idea.Sucuri  is one of the best WordPress security services out here. It provides malware detection and cleanup, monitors your site for hacks, mitigates DDoS attacks, and more.For a free solution, check out Wordfence Security or iThemes Security. Both quite good at what they do.You can also use the aforementioned Jetpack plugin here. If you pick a plan thats higher up the ladder $9 / month you will get daily scans for malware and threats with manual resolution.7. Set up Google Search ConsoleGoogle Search Console  (GSC) shou ld be a must-have item on your list. It will help you optimize your site SEO-wise and point you towards some of the issues with the structure of your site that you should address to make both your visitors and Google happy.More specifically, with GSC, you can learn about things such as: the health of your internal link structure, external links pointing to your site, any sitemap problems, your popular keywords, the indexing status of your site, any  crawl stats and errors, security issues, and much more. A true goldmine.8. Change your loginsThe easiest way to break into your WordPress site is to just guess your login and password. As abstract as it sounds, its really the case. There are software scripts and bots that go through hundreds of thousands of passwords and try their luck with each one.That is why you need to make sure that  your login details are strong enough.Some things you can do:Create a new user profile for all editing purposes the role of Editor. You can do it in the wp-admin, Users / Add New.Limit the login attempts allowed before the site is locked down. You can do it with a plugin like WP Limit Login Attempts.Use only safe passwords.Store your password data with LastPass.9. Change your sites basic informationCustomize your sites title, tagline, time zone, and favicon. Its very important to have an identity, Google will appreciate that.To do it, go to your WordPress dashboard and then to Settings / General.Also, change your permalink structure. Use something that is friendly and describes the content of each individual page.To change the permalink structure, go to Settings again, and then click on Permalinks. Youll see a couple of possibilities  there.  The best option  is to use your post names in the URLs:10. Create a sitemap.xml fileSitemap.xml  is a file that lists  all of your websites URLs. Google uses this file to understand how your site is organized and what sort of information is there. As a result, it will be easier for Google to index everything.To create a sitemap, all you have to do is install a plugin called  Google XML Sitemaps. Just a few clicks and youre good to go.ConclusionThat sums up our top 10 recommendations for new WordPress sites.Granted, there are many more things you could do, and myriads of plugins you could get to enable new and exciting functionalities on your site. But just be careful   not all plugins are safe and optimized. A good rule of thumb is to  stick with the things that you really need and that really make your WordPress site better in the long run.* This post contains affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links and then purchase the product, well receive a small fee. No worries though, youll still pay the standard amount so theres no cost on your part.