WP Settings
The WP Settings page lets you change common WordPress options without opening wp-admin. Open your site → WP Settings, edit any fields, and click Save Settings - only the fields you changed are applied.
The page has four tabs:
| Tab | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Settings | The WordPress options below - title, permalinks, reading, discussion |
| Users | The site's WordPress users, and password resets |
| Advanced | Maintenance mode and automatic updates |
| Debug | WordPress debugging constants |
General
- Site Title and Tagline - your site's name and one-line description.
- Timezone: e.g.
Europe/BerlinorUTC. - Site Language: e.g.
en_US. - WordPress Address and Site Address are shown for reference and are read-only here (they follow your connected domain).
Date & Time
- Date Format (e.g.
F j, Y) and Time Format (e.g.g:i a). - Week Starts On: the first day of the week.
Permalinks
Choose your URL structure: Plain, Day and name, Month and name,
Numeric, Post name, or a Custom Structure (e.g. /%postname%/).
Post name is the common, SEO-friendly choice.
Membership
- Anyone Can Register: let visitors create accounts.
- New User Default Role: the role new registrations get (
subscriber,contributor,author,editor, oradministrator).
Search engine visibility
Discourage search engines from indexing this site is WordPress's own
blog_public option. Turn it on while a site is being built so it doesn't get
picked up before it's ready - and remember to turn it off at launch.
It's a request, not a block
This asks well-behaved crawlers not to index the site. It is not access control, and nothing stops a crawler that ignores it. Use it to keep an unfinished site out of search results, not to keep anything private.
Comments
Disable Comments turns commenting off across the site in one switch, rather than per post.
Discussion & Reading
- Default Comment Status / Default Ping Status - whether new posts allow comments/pingbacks (Open or Closed).
- Posts Per Page: how many posts show on blog/archive pages.
Advanced configuration
Two switches at the bottom of the page:
- Maintenance Mode: show a maintenance page to visitors. See Maintenance Mode.
- Auto-update WordPress core: automatically apply minor and security releases (on by default).
Users
The Users tab lists your site's WordPress users and lets you reset a password without logging in to wp-admin. See User Management for the detail.
Advanced
- Maintenance Mode - show a maintenance page to visitors while you work. See Maintenance Mode.
- Auto-update WordPress core - automatically apply minor and security releases. These are the low-risk ones, and having them applied without you is usually safer than not having them applied at all.
- Auto-update all plugins and Auto-update all themes - keep everything installed on its latest release. You can also set this per plugin or theme on the Themes & Plugins page; these switches apply it to everything at once.
Debug
WordPress's debugging constants, each written into wp-config.php:
| Setting | Constant | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Debug mode | WP_DEBUG | Surface PHP notices, warnings and deprecations |
| Debug log | WP_DEBUG_LOG | Write errors to wp-content/debug.log |
| Debug display | WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY | Show those errors in the page output |
| Script debug | SCRIPT_DEBUG | Load unminified core CSS and JavaScript |
Debug mode is the master switch. WordPress ignores the log and display settings when it's off, so turning it off turns the others off with it.
Leave debugging off on a live site
Debug display in particular puts PHP errors into the page your visitors see, which is both ugly and a way of telling an attacker about your file paths and versions. If you need to debug a live site, use Debug log and read the file over SFTP instead.