How To: Set Up Your Showit Blog

Before you officially launch your WordPress/Showit blog, there are a LOT of settings to adjust to make sure everything’s organized on the backend –

Which is annoying, but only has to happen once!

If you have a NEW blog (and you’re not importing posts), you have a blank slate – which makes things super simple and easy to set up. Here’s everything you need to do to make sure your WordPress settings are set correctly for your Showit blog.

Wait, My WordPress Settings for My Showit Blog?

Yep, you read that correctly.

Showit partners with WordPress for content management (AKA, blogging) – so if you have a Showit website with a blog, you have both. You’ll adjust the design for all of your blog pages in Showit (drag, drop, done) then add blog posts to your associated WordPress account and watch them show up on your Showit website.

It’s a simple way to get the use of the most powerful content management system (WordPress) with the easiest, most aesthetic website designer (Showit).

For more about the WordPress/Showit combo, click here!

How To Set Up Your Showit Blog

If you’re starting a new blog, you’ll request a WordPress blog setup when you connect your website design to your domain.

​💡 I recommend doing this 2-3 days before announcing your website on social media, to your audience, etc. This gives Showit some time to set up your blog, gives you some time to complete all of the settings and add content, and gives you the margin to make any design edits you want once there’s live content on your blog.

To start connecting your domain, navigate to the Showit builder and click “Site Settings” in the top left corner.

• Under “Custom Domain,” click “edit”
• Follow the steps, adding the domain you’ve purchased and indicating that you need a new blog set up 

The Showit team will get to work on setting up your new WordPress blog that will connect with your Showit website design to display blog content on your live website.

You’ll receive an email when your blog is ready, along with the DNS settings you’ll need to add to your domain to launch your website and take it live.

How To Log Into Your Showit Blog

You’ll log into your blog by visiting yourwebsite.com/wp-admin.

By default, Showit sets the login information for your WordPress blog to be the same as your login for Showit (same email, same password).

WordPress Settings For Your Showit Blog

Here are all the settings you’ll need to check or correct for your new Showit blog! Find them by navigating to the left sidebar, and hovering over “Settings.”

General Settings

• Change your site title (to your business name)
• Upload your favicon – even if you already did in Showit! The one you added to the Showit app will show on non-blog pages, and the one you add to WP will show on the blog pages (just use the same file!)
• Update your timezone
• Optional: Change “week starts on” to Sunday – this is more personal preference, but affects how the calendar shows up when you schedule a post in advance.

Settings → Writing

• Optional: Choose a default post category for your posts to automatically use (if you don’t change this, they’ll be “uncategorized” by default – but you can add a category when you publish each post)

Settings → Reading

• “Blog pages show at most” → This setting will dictate how many blog posts show on the main blog page. If your blog feed is in columns (2 columns, 3 columns, etc), set this to a multiple of the number of columns (like 8 posts or 9 posts, respectively, for these examples).
• Optional: For each post in a feed, set to “Show excerpt” (otherwise, your blog feed will show the entire post and be cluttered).

Settings → Permalinks

The permalink is the way that your blog post links are structured! You can choose between things like yourwebsite.com/CATEGORY-NAME/POST-NAME, yourwebsite.com/POST-NAME, etc.

I recommend setting this as “Post Name” to keep your links short, clear, and evergreen (adding post dates can clutter things up, date old content, and are easier to mess up in the future – more data means more opportunity for human error if you ever change or update posts).

Plugins

• Optional: Activate Yoast SEO! This is a great SEO plugin with a free version (although I do use and love the paid versions)