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Simple WordPress Tasks That Seem Difficult

Andy Forsberg
11 Jan 2022
5 min read

WordPress is capable of an insane amount of functionality even just in its core. Sometimes you need to make changes on your WordPress website that seem like they're going to be difficult to do. This can sometimes lead to you looking for a complex solution, when a very simple one already exists. The following are seven examples of seemingly difficult WordPress adjustments, that are actually incredibly simple tasks. You just have to know where to look.

  1. Change the number of posts shown per page on Blog index
  2. In the WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings > Reading and enter the number of posts you want shown per page where it says Blog pages show at most and then save your changes.
  3. Disable automatic comments and pingbacks for everything
  4. In the WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings > Discussion and in the Default article settings area uncheck Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks) & Allow people to post comments on new articles and then save your changes. Now all of your newly created pages & posts will not have these enabled by default.
  5. Block or Unblock Search Engines from indexing your website
  6. In the WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings > Reading and toggle the checkbox to your preference next to Search Engine Visibility and then save your changes.
  7. How To Remove Gravatar Hovercards
  8. In the WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings > Discussion and then under the Avatars section uncheck Gravatar Hovercards "View people's profiles when you mouse over their Gravatars" and then save your changes.
  9. View more Comments per page in WordPress Dashboard
  10. In the WordPress admin dashboard go to Comments and click on "Screen Options" in the top right, then change it to the number of Comments you'd like to view per page and click Apply. The same is true for Pages, Plugins, Posts, Media, etc.
  11. Disable default organization of uploads by month and year
  12. In the WordPress admin dashboard go to Settings > Media and then uncheck Uploading Files "Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders" and then save your changes.
  13. Get rid of that damn -2 that keeps being auto-added to my permalink
  14. This is what happens in WordPress when the permalink URL you are trying to use has already been taken. You simply need to find whatever it is that's taken the URL slug and trash it, then go into trash and delete it permanently so the permalink URL becomes available once again for use.

Have any others to add?

Please share them in the comments, I'd love to hear them!

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