In your website’s General Settings, you can control several aspects of your site, including the title, language, privacy, and more. This guide will explain each setting.
In this guide
To visit your site’s General Settings:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Settings → General (or Hosting → Settings if using WP-Admin).
The following settings are located in your site’s General Settings section:
The Privacy settings control who can and cannot view your site:
See our Privacy Settings guide to learn what each option means for your site.
With gift subscriptions enabled, a visitor will see a banner at the top of your site to pay to renew your WordPress.com plan and domain when they are close to expiring. Toggle this option off, and no banner will be shown.
See our Gift a WordPress.com Subscription guide to learn more.
All WordPress.com websites display a link to WordPress.com in the footer. You can click the “change footer credit” button to adjust what it says, or remove it entirely on eligible plans.
Visit our Footer Credit Options guide to learn more.
The Site Tools section provides the following options. Click the link to visit our instructions for each topic:
The following settings are located in Settings → General, regardless of the admin interface style:
Your Site title will also appear in your website’s dashboard and as the sender’s name when your subscribers receive email notifications when you publish a post.
Using the Site Title and Site Tagline blocks, you can also display the site title and tagline across other parts of your website.
Your site’s title can be anything you’d like to describe your site. It doesn’t have to be the same as your site’s address or your account’s username. It’s recommended to use a cleaned-up version of your address (e.g., myawesomesite can become My Awesome Site) or change it to whatever best reflects your site’s personality and topic succinctly.
The Site tagline is a short description or catchy phrase to describe what your site is about and can be beneficial for SEO.
Visit the following guide if you want to set or change your site icon.
The Language setting controls your site’s default language as seen by the public. It sets the language used for certain text elements of your site that you cannot edit directly, e.g., the comments form and some built-in buttons.
Each site has its own language setting, so if you have multiple sites associated with your account, each one can have a different language.
The language setting will not translate the text you have written on your site. See options for creating a multi-language site here.
If you select an RTL language (for example, Hebrew), the theme’s layout will mirror itself so that the text can be read properly from right to left.
You can help translate WordPress.com themes into more than 100 languages. Learn how to get started on our translation portal site.
You can also change your Interface Language, which is the language used for your WordPress.com dashboard (not visible to the public.) This is a separate setting from your site’s language.
Set your site’s timezone to the timezone you are based in to ensure scheduled posts and pages are published at your desired time. Using the dropdown, you can select your closest city or choose a specific UTC offset.
If you are using WP-Admin you will see these additional settings in Settings → General:
- Administration Email Address – the email address used for admin purposes.
- Membership – a checkbox that can be enabled to allow anyone to register.
- New User Default Role – when new users join your site, what their default user role should be.
- Date Format – format for date fields.
- Time Format – format for time fields.
- Week Starts On – day of the week that a week starts on.
Date and Time Format, as well as the “Week starts on” options are located in Settings → Writing if not using WP-Admin.
