Joomla Basic Settings: Backend basic configuration

Introduction

Since you already Joomla installed now it's time to configure the basic settings of your website. In this tutorial, we will focus on the first part of configuring Joomla's global settings. In the following sections you will learn how to customize your website settings, including search engine friendly URLs, metadata information and cookie settings.

Access to the basic settings

To continue, please log in to your Joomla admin dashboard first. Once you have logged in, go to the top menu bar and select "System" and then "Configuration".

The "Configuration" page offers you as the site administrator the opportunity to adjust the general settings that are important for the basic settings of your Joomla website - as the name suggests.

As already mentioned, this tutorial focuses on the first tab "Site".

Configure site settings

Once you've accessed the Site tab, you'll notice that it's divided into several sections that contain specific site settings. We'll go through each section in detail and explain everything to make sure you understand what exactly they control and affect.

Let's start with the first section "Site settings". Here you can control the settings for the operation of your backend and frontend pages.

Name of the website: In this field you need to enter the title of your website, which will be used in several places, e.g. in the browser title bar, in the admin area, on offline pages, etc.

Website Offline: You can think of this as "Under construction" mode. When you enable this option, the front end of your website displays the "Website is offline" message to anyone who tries to access the website.

Front-end editing: This setting determines which parts of your website you can edit directly from the frontend. You can choose between "Modules", "Modules & Menus" and "None". Note that the ability to edit your modules from the frontend will certainly save you a lot of time and effort.

Standard editor: Pretty self-explanatory, this setting determines the editor used to create or update the content of your website. You can choose between "TinyMCE", "CodeMirror" and "None", where you have to edit the HTML code directly. Please note that these editors come pre-installed with Joomla. If you have additional editors installed (as Joomla extensions), they will also appear in the options drop-down list.

Standard captcha: In this dropdown menu you can select the captcha type to be used on your web pages. Please note that the desired captcha must first be installed as a Joomla extension.

Default access level: This setting determines the level of access that is provided to newly published content on your website. The default setting is Public, which means that it is visible to all visitors to the site. If for some reason you want to restrict access to certain groups, please select the appropriate option. Note that you can override this selection when you submit new content.

Default list length: This setting determines the maximum number of elements that will be listed on the pages of your Joomla admin area. The value selected here is preset on the page, but can be changed on the page itself if needed.

Default feed limit: This setting determines the number of articles that will be displayed in the news feeds of your Joomla website.

Feed email address: The news feed content generated by your Joomla website may contain an email address as part of the author's identity. This setting determines the source of this email address. The "Site Email" receives the "From" email address set in the global configuration (Server tab), and the "Author Email" uses the address set for the author of the site content.

Joomla Basic Settings - Metadata Settings

Next, let's take a look at the "Metadata settings", which are located directly below. Here you can specify your metadata information, which is generally used by search engines. This information has an impact on the optimization of your website and your ranking in the search results.

Meta Description: This is the global meta description of your website. It applies to all pages of the website and is used by search engines to determine the content of the website. Therefore, it is recommended to include all keywords that are relevant to your web content to achieve better ranking results. If no information is defined here, it will be taken from the web pages.

Robots: Controls whether your website is indexed and crawled by search engines. Index" means that you allow search engines to index the content of your website, and "Follow" means that you allow search engines to follow and crawl the links on your website. The "No Follow/No Crawl" option restricts the actions described above.

Content Rights: In this field, you must specify the Rights metadata entry for the content. In simple terms, this indicates what rights others have to the website content. If no information is defined here, it will be taken from the website.

Author meta tag ads: When this setting is enabled, an "author" meta tag entry (containing the author's name) is inserted into the page header.

Show Joomla version: Controls whether the version of the application is displayed.

Joomla Basic Settings - SEO Settings

Just below that on the page you will see the sections "SEO settings" and "Cookie settings".

In the first section "SEO Settings" you can configure your SEO-friendly URLs. SEO-friendly URLs are considered an essential ranking factor. They are also easy to read and more user-friendly for visitors.

Search engine friendly URLs: This setting determines whether the use of SEO-friendly URLs is enabled or disabled on your Joomla website.

Use URL rewrite: This setting determines whether the server's rewrite engine is used to rewrite URLs. Simply put, if you enable this option, the filename "index.php" will be omitted from your website URLs (i.e. "http://meinedomain.ch" instead of "http://meinedomain.ch/index.php").

Append file extension to URL: This setting determines whether suffixes are added to URLs based on the document type. For example, if it is enabled, the URL will be displayed as "http://meinedomain.ch/index.php/testseite.html", while if it is disabled, it will exclude the ".html" suffix. It is recommended to leave it disabled as it may cause some confusion to the user when entering the URL address.

Unicode aliases: This setting lets you choose between the "Transliteration" (No) and "Unicode" (Yes) aliases. Simply put, when disabled, non-Latin characters are automatically converted to Latin wherever appropriate (for example, in URLs). If enabled, the non-Latin characters will remain unchanged. Please note that regardless of your selection, your previously created content will not be affected.

Website name also in page titles: This setting allows you to set your "site name" (which we entered above) as the opening or closing page title on all your pages.

That's it! You now have the Basic settings of your Joomla site completed, including metadata, SEO and cookie settings. We hope that you found the information in this guide useful and that our instructions were easy to understand. If you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact our Support Team to turn.