Hello and welcome to this article about managing your WordPress user settings and setting up your Gravatar. If you have stumbled upon this post from Gawd knows where, you may be interested to know that this is from a series of articles from a Kindle eBook called, “How to Set Up a WordPress Website from Scratch.” If you would prefer to buy the book to make life easier, feel free to download it by clicking the image below.

Managing Your WordPress User Settings

The next part of your dashboard that needs to be looked at is your WordPress user settings. This is more important than many people think because spending time on your user profile will make you look more authoritative and thus will help your reputation. As always, there’s a video to help you if you need it.

Look to the left in the black sidebar and you’ll see ‘Users’. Click on that now and you should see the username you use for signing in. There should be an image there but there won’t be. We’ll come to that in a minute. 

Let’s go through the different sections on this ‘Profile’ page. Firstly, hover the cursor over your username and you will see ‘Edit’ and ‘View’. Click on ‘Edit’. 

Section 1: Personal Options

The first section is cosmetic and doesn’t have anything of any real importance in it. You can change the colour scheme if you want but I wouldn’t bother. You can leave all the other settings as they are.

Section 2: Name

Now, scroll down a bit more and you will get to a section called ‘Name’. We are going to personalise your blog name here by putting in your first and second name, a nickname and your display name. 

By the way, you do not have to use your real name. In fact, you’d be amazed at how many people are using a ‘nom de web’ instead of their real name. If you want to, you can do the same. However, I would read the following before making a decision about this. 

If you are going to maintain a personal blog or a website is for your business, then you’ll probably want to use your real name as your display name. Your display name is the name that will show up as author information each time you write a new blog post. 

If you are planning to set up an affiliate marketing site or a site that sells products, for example, a dropshipping site, then you may want to use a different name to your own. I suppose it really depends on who you are and what you’re selling, so the choice is yours.

Section 3: Contact Info

In this section, there is your contact information. The first box is your email, which will be the one you used when you installed WordPress. Feel free to change it to your website email that you created earlier if you want. Remember, WordPress will send you an email with a link that you’ll need to click to confirm your new email. If you don’t confirm your new email, it won’t change. In the next box, you can put in your website address if it’s not already there.

There is also a ton of space for your social media links. I am a huge fan of using social media to market your website but not all social media works in the same way. Now, I can’t go into all the different sites and which ones are the best to use for each specific occasion because it is a huge topic. Check out my website and if you see a book about social media, you know I have written one especially for you!

Section 4: About Yourself

In this section, there is your ‘Biographical Info’ box where you can write a few lines about yourself. This is also where we get to upload a picture of yourself using Gravatar. Look at where it says ‘Profile Picture’ and you will see that there is no image. This is because you haven’t set up your gravatar yet. 

A gravatar is an image that represents you. It can be a photo of yourself or anything else you want. Where is says ‘Profile Picture’ you should see a blue link saying, “You can change your profile picture on Gravatar.” Press the ‘ctrl’ (PC) or ‘Command’ (Apple) and then click on the link to open up Gravatar in a new tab.

To get into your Gravatar account, you will need to sign in to wordpress.com. If you don’t have an account, which you probably don’t, you will need to create one now. Once you have logged in, you need to click ‘My Gravatars’ at the top of the page. 

You should then be on a page with a couple of links. One says, “Add email address” and the other says, “Add a new image”. I don’t think I really need to tell you what to do here. Just make sure that you use the same email address that you have used for your website or this won’t work.

If you have done everything correctly, you will see your photo as your profile picture in your contact info. Don’t worry if it doesn’t appear immediately. This is one of those internet things where you may need to wait for a while before it appears.

Section 5: Account Management

Finally, this is where you can change your password and log out everywhere. Changing your password is pretty self-explanatory but the other option is a very useful new addition to WordPress. Basically, if you logged into your website at work or an internet cafe and you’re not sure you logged out, click ‘Log Out Everywhere Else’ and it will do exactly that. Very handy indeed in my humble opinion.

Wrapping WordPress User Settings All Up

Well done! You have now sorted your WordPress user settings section of your website. Hopefully, you will not have to go back to that section unless you want to add new users in the future, which usually won’t happen for most websites and blogs.