Most of these steps are optional, but highly recommended

Set up Anti-Spam

Spam comments are an unfortunate reality of life on the internet, so you’ll need something to stop them.

Akismet is a highly respected solution, and is free for personal users, but you need to sign up for a free account with them first. There’s a lot more details about getting set up on their website.

There are other Antispam plugins out there too.

Delete Inactive themes and plugins

It’s recommended (for security) that you delete any plugins or themes you aren’t using, with the execption of leaving one standard theme available to use as a fallback.

Go to the plugins section from the menu on the left. There should be a red delete link under each inactive plugin

Go to the themes section. Click on an inactive theme, then find the delete link in the bottom-right corner.

Add domain name to server hosts file

WordPress can report some weird errors when it can’t access itself, which can sometimes happen if your router is misbehaving or you’re running offline for some reason.

To do this we add an entry to the server’s hosts file. This tells the server that our wordpress domain (e.g. www.example.org) should be on this server.

sudoedit /etc/hosts

Add this line, anywhere

127.0.0.1 www.example.org