Should I delete the Hello World post and Sample Page in WordPress?

What a new install creates

WordPress fills an empty site so that the theme has something to show. After installation you have:

The first three are public the moment the site is. They appear in the sitemap, the feed and the blog index. The sample comment links out to wordpress.org and Gravatar. The post's own text invites you to "edit or delete it".

Why it matters for SEO

One stray placeholder will not sink a site. The reasons to remove it are still good ones:

• It gets indexed. Search for the exact phrase "Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post." and you will find a great many live sites. Those pages say nothing about the business they sit on.
• It is the first impression of your content. On a new domain, Google has little to go on. A handful of real pages plus two boilerplate ones is a worse sample than the real pages alone.
• It leaks into other pages. The post shows on the homepage or blog index, in "recent posts" lists, and gives the Uncategorized category archive something to display.
• It signals an unfinished site to visitors, which matters more than any algorithm.

Removing them is a two-minute task with no downside.

The clean-up, in order

Do this before pointing a domain at the site, or as soon as you notice on a live one.

1. Posts → All Posts. Move "Hello world!" to Trash, then empty the Trash. Its comment is removed with it.
2. Pages → All Pages. Trash "Sample Page" and empty the Trash.
3. Privacy Policy draft. Either write it properly and publish it, or leave it as a draft. A draft is not public.
4. Posts → Categories. Rename Uncategorized to a real category, and change its slug to match. It cannot be deleted while it is the default category, but it can be renamed, or you can choose a different default under Settings → Writing and then delete it.
5. Settings → General. Replace the default tagline while you are there.
6. Appearance. Remove demo content your theme imported: placeholder posts, team members, portfolio items and their images. Theme demos are the larger version of this problem.
7. Plugins. Delete bundled sample plugins you do not use.

Then open /hello-world/ and /sample-page/ in a private window and confirm both return a 404.

If the placeholders were already indexed

On a site that has been live for a while, check first:

site:example.com "hello world"
site:example.com "sample page"

If they are indexed, deleting them is still the right fix. They will return 404 and drop out of Google after being recrawled. No redirect is needed: nobody links to these pages, and sending /hello-world/ to the homepage gains nothing.

Two exceptions:

• The Hello world post was edited into a real article but kept its slug. Then it is real content at an odd address. Leave it, or change the slug once; WordPress redirects a post's old slug automatically.
• Sample Page was turned into your About page. Same idea. Rename the slug to about and add a redirect from /sample-page/, since core does not redirect old page slugs. Hydrogen SEO's Auto Redirection in the Redirection Manager records one when you change it.

For a fuller pre-launch list, including permalinks, the search visibility setting and the sitemap, see our SEO setup for a new WordPress site.