The strength or weakness of your WordPress site is entirely up to you. Of course, we’d all like to create the most impressive websites possible. However, this won’t happen automatically; you’ll need to make some deliberate decisions and put in some effort. Although this is the mentality every WordPress user should adopt, we all make mistakes for two reasons: first, we are in a rush all the time, and second, we are a reckless species in general. Don’t forget that making mistakes is part of being human.
Top Mistakes to Avoid in WordPress:
1. Choosing the Wrong WordPress Platform
Choosing the wrong WordPress platform is probably the first and greatest error people make. WordPress hosts two distinct types of websites:
For more complex, self-hosted websites, check out WORDPRESS.ORG.
WORDPRESS.COM is the official, free WordPress platform.
While both are WordPress hosts, the degree of customization available on each is distinct. Before you begin developing a website, you should make sure you fully grasp the similarities and differences and the connections between the two.
Many WordPress users find themselves in financial trouble by subscribing to unnecessary premium features. There are literally hundreds of hosting providers to choose from, making it challenging to locate a good deal.
You should make sure to pick a modest entry price that is easily scalable and has everything you need. Once you’ve found the ideal hosting service, you can rest easy knowing you won’t have to struggle with this typical WordPress blunder again.
2. Paying Too Much For Hosting
You’ll need a domain name and WordPress hosting to launch your website. The problem is that many registrars of domain names also provide additional services, which might be a nuisance. New business owners find this to be very perplexing. Privacy protection, additional email accounts, security services, and other features may be available as optional extras. You can avoid doing any of these things and use the money you’ve saved to invest in expanding your company. Your hosting provider should sell you those features if you ever find you need them.
In addition, your website will need a reliable hosting service. A shared hosting account is all you need to get started online for 90% of websites. You might opt to switch to a managed WordPress hosting firm as your business expands, or you can enhance your current hosting plan.
Check out our breakdown of how much it costs to run a WordPress site, and how you may save costs without sacrificing quality.
3. Picking the Incorrect WordPress Theme
Choosing the correct design for a website built with WordPress might be difficult for novices. Because there are so many available WordPress themes, a newcomer may end up rebuilding their site several times before finding the one that works best. We advise picking the proper WordPress theme from the get-go and sticking with it. This will help people get to know your brand and the tone of your website. Maintaining a steady aesthetic is crucial to building brand recognition.
Readers frequently ask us for advice on how to pick a winning subject. In terms of aesthetics, we choose minimalism over glitz. Not only has it been a boon to us, but also to many other thriving eCommerce operations.
You should select a clean and uncomplicated WordPress theme that prioritizes the following:
- It needs to have a consistent appearance across desktop computers, mobile phones, and tablets.
- It should be simple to modify to fit your specifications.
- Compatible with standard WordPress plugins and page builders.
- It needs to run quickly and efficiently.
We’re aware that you may not be able to verify all of these factors as a non-technical user independently. If so, we advise going with a premium WordPress theme from a provider like StudioPress, Themify, or Astra Theme.
Learn about top WP themes here.
4. Not Taking a Backup
Have you ever visited your website and thought, “Man, I need to get some stuff up here.” Just forget about the backup for now. Allow us to inform you, dear friend, that doing so is one of the most serious errors you may make while working with WordPress. The financial cost could be minimal, substantial, or catastrophic. Terrifying tales of thousands of dollars lost by online business owners (bloggers, content curators, etc.) because they put off backing up their data abound.
A webmaster of any discipline must schedule and protect backups as a fundamental duty. There is not much room for an apprentice to make mistakes when using WordPress. However, if you get into the nitty-gritty of things, such as tweaking a theme or setting up an advanced plugin, you could:
- Crush the site’s aesthetics
- Put out the Death’s-Head White Screen
Unrecoverable events occur frequently; no one is ever 100% accurate. As a result, having a backup in place is crucial. Those who believe that WordPress routinely creates backups of user data are mistaken.
The problem is easily solved, though, by the wide variety of backup plugins for WordPress that are both free and paid. Having many WordPress sites? VaultPress is the way to go. Our favorite content management system (CMS) developer and provider Automattic, is responsible for designing and maintaining it. Several of our preferred WordPress backup plugins are:
- VaultPress (premium)
- BackupBuddy from iThemes (premium)
- BackWPUp (free)
5. Testing New Products on a Live Site
This common blunder can have serious consequences, yet many people keep making it. Let’s say you read the last point (yeah!) and choose to install a backup plugin, like BackWPUp, on your live WordPress site. Instead of testing the plugin locally, you opt to implement it on the live site right away.
What if something goes wrong, and you have to take the site down for a few hours so that you can fix the brand new damage that has been done? Here are some of the items you’ll be losing:
- Free, unpaid hits from search engines
- Clicks on ads Earnings from affiliate programs
- Results and sales
- Consent forms for sending email
If Google sends a searcher to your site and learns that it’s down, you’ll lose search engine rankings. That is to say, you will see a decline in both visitors and revenue. The solution is to create a test environment on a duplicate of your real site to try out new versions of WordPress themes and plugins. The WPEngine staging area is the best illustration of this. To facilitate testing, it simply creates a clone of your site using the most up-to-date version of WordPress. If something goes wrong, you can always roll back to a previous good backup.
We usually encourage having an excellent WordPress hosting environment, but if your provider doesn’t have a staging area, you should create one up yourself. Try out brand-new goods and services on your dummy infrastructure. When everything is set up and working as it should, integrate the new section with the existing site
6. Not Using Categories and Tags Properly
Another major flaw is improper use of tags and categories. Some users make the mistake of assigning categories where tags would have been more appropriate and vice versa.
We have encountered websites with many different categories but no tags. Websites with hundreds of tags but no categories have been seen.
You can think of categories as the index to your website. If a website were a filing cabinet, its sections would be the drawers. Tags, on the other hand, function much like an online directory. Tags are like the labels on the folders of a filing cabinet, only for your website.
7. Installing Too Many Plugins
There is a distinction between having a plugin installed and having that plugin active. There are only two possible states for a plugin: active and inactive. Whether you install a plugin via the FTP upload or the plugin manager, the plugin will stay inactive until you manually activate it. The plugin won’t function until you actively enable it.
The second state, “active,” refers to a website running WordPress with the plugin installed and activated. When many plugins are used simultaneously, problems can occur. There are two primary potential issues:
- Discord between plugins and between plugins and themes – Some plugins or themes may prevent other plugins or themes from functioning properly. A plugin (or theme) might potentially hoard a resource indefinitely, preventing other plugins or themes from accessing it. If another plugin tries to utilize the resource, it will fail because it has been denied access. As a result, the updated plugin was useless.
- Plugin bugs – The WordPress plugin library is stocked to the brim with useful add-ons. The project welcomes contributions from both inexperienced coders and those with years of industry expertise. The latter has superior code quality, which is where the difference resides. As a result, we shouldn’t use plugins that have a low number of downloads. Even if we do, we should put it through its paces in a controlled lab environment.
Solution:
- Use only well-established, widely-used plugins and themes.
- Make do with the minimum necessary plugins (as close to zero as possible).
- Put inactive add-ons to rest
- Don’t use plugins that aren’t officially supported by WordPress.
- Verify that your chosen plugins are compatible with the WordPress version you’re using.
- Before adding a plugin with significant new features, be sure to create a full backup.
- Create a test installation of WordPress and play around with different plugin combinations.
8. Not Choosing The Right URL Structure (Permalinks)
Let’s not forget that even if we add new permalink structures, this one will continue to function. A keyword-rich URL format is recommended for ease of use. Your search engine rankings will rise and your visitors’ ability to recall the URL will increase. Having a well-thought-out permalink structure (website address) is crucial. Changing your URL structure down the road is difficult and can have serious consequences for your website’s popularity.
In the WordPress admin area, navigate to Settings » Permalinks and select a permalink structure that includes the post’s name.
- Post Name is the permalink structure WPExplorer employs and suggests.
- Permalinks can be edited in the WordPress dashboard, but only if the.htaccess file is editable.
- WordPress suggests setting the.htaccess file’s permissions to 644 in order to accomplish this.
- WordPress will provide the necessary code for your preferred permalink structure in case you are unable to make the necessary changes to the.htaccess file via the administrative interface. The.htaccess file can then be updated manually either your hosting account’s file management or an FTP client.
9. Not Providing a Contact Form
Lack of a contact form on a WordPress site is the most common mistake we find. WPForms is the premier plugin for creating forms in WordPress. Have it without spending a dime! When it comes to lead generation and expanding your organization, your contact form is important. You can use online forms for anything from soliciting ideas and feedback to conducting surveys and even recruiting guest bloggers.
But that contact form… why do you need that? Is it too much to ask that you make your email address public?
You could, however there are a few issues with making your email address public on your site. The results of having your email address scraped include numerous spam messages.
When you click an email address, you’re normally taken to your email program; this isn’t ideal if you’re using a public computer. Information cannot be collected in a uniform fashion, nor can it be obtained in its entirety at a single sitting. It’s difficult to multitask when people contact you, so you can’t, for example, sign them up for your email marketing lists at the same time.
The WPForms plugin makes it easy for anyone to create a basic inquiry form. In fact, we’ve provided a basic contact form sample to facilitate this process.
The form can be published as-is and modified at a later date. It is simple to develop your shapes over time if you wish to construct a more complex form using the simple one as a foundation. With WPForms, you can easily include your contact form on your site. No need to steal any code!
10. Accidentally Breaking Your Web Forms
Even using a WordPress form template, creating a form can be time-consuming. Once you have perfected your form, you will want to continue using it.
Forms can be broken when edited. It’s possible to remove a field or alter the conditional logic by mistake. Sometimes the only way we realize we’ve made a shift is when we suddenly cease getting vital information. Therefore, it may cost both time and money to figure out what was altered.
Thankfully, WPForms’s form updates solve this issue. If you make a mistake on one of your forms, you may easily go back to a previous version by browsing the revision history.
The days of last-second fear after clicking “save” on a form are over, thanks to revisions. Your forms’ versions, update histories, and contributors are all easily accessible with this tool. Simply revert back to an earlier point in time if a form ever stops functioning as expected.
11. Accidentally Deleting Your Forms
When you try to delete a form, many form plugins will give you a warning first. However, if numerous individuals access your site, one of them might delete the wrong form thinking it wasn’t being used. If the form you were working on disappears, you may also lose the data you entered into it. Some form plugins need restoring the complete site from backup in order to get your forms back.
Using two different techniques, WPForms has eliminated this frequent WordPress problem. The first option is a trash bin. A deleted form will stay in the trash unless you choose to permanently remove it.
If you lose data in a form and then restore it, you won’t lose it.
To bring a form back from the Trash, simply hover over its name and select the Restore option. There’s also a tool that lets you track down every instance of your embedded forms.
It’s much easier to keep track of which forms are still needed and which can be discarded with this system in place.
12. Failing to Run Important Updates
As the functionality of your WordPress site grows, you’ll want to add more plugins and themes. That’s a red flag that your site’s coding is likely outdated. It is essential to always use the most recent versions of plugins and themes. A more secure website benefits from new features, bug fixes, and code updates.
If you don’t keep up with these upgrades, your plugins and themes will eventually stop working together. Using outdated software increases the risk of the site being compromised or rendered inaccessible. To avoid this mistake, just turn on automatic updates. Maintaining a monthly review checklist is highly recommended.
13. Ignoring SEO’s Potential for Enhanced Positioning
In other words, you need SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO techniques that can be implemented with minimal effort include:
- Google’s Keyword Tool
- Making content accessible and easy to understand
- Seeing if Google understands your site’s structure is a crucial step.
That will increase the likelihood that people will come across your material.
Putting off SEO could be detrimental to the growth of your site and business. The good news is that there are many different SEO tactics you can use to increase your site’s rankings. On-page search engine optimization includes things like URL architecture, header tags, and meta descriptions.
Smart Sitemaps are useful for analyzing search terms. If you want to implement these techniques, you’ll need a top-notch SEO plugin like All in One SEO
15. Not Checking Site Analytics
You may learn a lot about your website’s effectiveness by analyzing data from your site’s analytics. It’s essential to focus on audience growth over time. Using analytics software like Google Analytics, you can track things like how long visitors spend on your site and what pages they visit most often.
Unfortunately, many webmasters install Google Analytics but then ignore it. They are thereby failing to gain access to information that could assist them enhance their website.
If you’re struggling to make sense of your Google Analytics data, the MonsterInsights plugin can help. Best of all, you won’t have to waste time going to Google Analytics’s site to get reports when you can view all the essential information right in your WordPress dashboard.
With MonsterInsights, you can:
- See who’s visiting your website
- Learn how they’re finding it
- Track site user’s paths (where they click, etc)
- Determine the most visited pages on your website
- Track conversions
15. Using Posts and Pages Incorrectly
WordPress’s default installation includes support for two post kinds, posts and pages. While they share a same appearance in the WordPress admin area, their functions are rather distinct. Blog content is typically written in the form of posts. You can write a blog article about anything, even if it might be time-sensitive. Your homepage, about us, and contact us pages are all good examples of the types of pages that should not (or rarely) update.
As your website expands and more content is published, confusion and chaos are inevitable if you haven’t established clear boundaries between posts and pages from the start.
17. Mismatched Classifications and Labels
Tags and categories have a lot in common. You can organize your posts into different categories and add descriptive tags to each one. Another frequent blunder made by WordPress users is use categories when they should be using tags, and vice versa.
Categories function much like a table of contents, while tags do the same for phrases. One of the most common ways people mess up their WordPress sites is through misusing these features. As an example, you may not want tag archives to be included in search results indexing. Rankings for valuable material could be impacted if you’ve jumbled up tags and categories.
17. Ignoring Spam Comments
It’s up to you whether you want to enable comments on your WordPress site or not. It could be dependent on the volume of comments you receive or the time you have to monitor them. If you allow comments on your site without any moderation, you run the risk of having spam and phishing links submitted.
Spam comments and postings can potentially lower your site’s search engine rankings. The spammy comments may be seen as legitimate content by some search engines. However, these postings can harm your rating because they have nothing in common with your website or readership. Database space can also be consumed by spam comments and irrelevant user feedback. One simple approach is to use an anti-spam plugin. You should also check out these essential WordPress tools and tips for dealing with comment spam.
18. Using images that aren’t optimized
It’s not easy to pick the perfect images for your website, but once you do, you shouldn’t overlook their SEO potential. They can also improve your site’s usability. After deciding on the right pictures for your website, you should give them some significance. They should be of high quality and relevant, but they might take up a lot of space and slow down your site if you don’t manage them properly.
Strive for a happy medium between quantity and quality. Nobody loves to read through a wall of text when they visit a website. On the other hand, they have better things to do than wait for your site to load for more than five seconds.
Choose the right size, format, dimensions, file name, and alt text for your photos to ensure they are relevant and engage the viewer. A word of advice: stay away from stock photos! If you use a cliché, people will notice.
19. Not optimizing your website for SEO
The most insightful and interesting writing in the world is useless if no one reads it. And search engine optimization is critical to your material being found online.
Due to the importance of organic traffic from search engines, it is essential to optimize your website using optimal SEO strategies. SEO may help you stand out from the crowd in a number of ways, including drawing in more visitors and broadening your online presence.
Optimising on-page features like URLs, meta descriptions, and title tags is just the beginning; basic techniques such as competitive keyword research, link development, and content creation are essential. The Yoast SEO plugin can be installed for additional advanced SEO capabilities.
20. Risking website security
WordPress has security flaws like any other large content management system (CMS), unfortunately. If you want to protect your site from cybercriminals, there’s more you can do than just install a security plugin.
First of all, the username “admin” is reserved for system administrators and should not be used. Instead, pick a password that has some meaning to you but is difficult for a hacker to guess. Similarly, you shouldn’t have a weak password.
The following should be included in your password:
- One uppercase letter
- One lowercase letter
- At least one number
- One unique character
Passwords like m@rA$rdl3y are too complicated for anyone to remember. If you tend to forget your passwords, consider using a password manager.
21. Testing changes on a live site
There is always the risk that something will go wrong when updating your site, whether you’re installing a new theme, plugin, widget, or performing any other type of update. You can see a decline in things like traffic, affiliate earnings, ad clicks, conversion rates, and more.
You can avoid this by making updates to a test version of your live site. You can accomplish this easily by installing a plugin that makes a copy of your WordPress site just before you save any new changes. You may begin trying out these improvements in a safe environment by searching for “staging” in the plugin directory.
22. Free Themes from Shady Sources
Some free WordPress themes may seem risk-free, but they may actually be malware disguised as a legitimate design. Not the thousands available in the WordPress theme library alone. You can rest certain that every theme contributed to the repository is thoroughly inspected for malicious code as part of the rigorous selection process.
Those “free stunning WordPress themes” you see advertised on websites you’ve never heard of. These “free themes” have been known to contain malware in the past. The best places to get free themes are:
- WordPress Repository
- Reputable sources such as WPExplorer or WooThemes
23. Not Installing a Security Plugin
Here at last comes the post’s crowning glory: a security add-on. WordPress has a number of known and unknown security flaws, many of which are related to the specifics of your hosting setup and WordPress installation. Fixing each of these security holes is a time-consuming ordeal.
Moreover, many WordPress users lack the technical expertise to understand and apply the precautions. That’s why it’s essential to install a security add-on. Premium pricing is available for the additional security features required by most membership sites. One recommended practice after your internet business is making money is to:
Make the change to a managed WordPress hosting service. Use a paid plugin for security, like iThemes Security Pro, which requires a subscription.
24. Using the Default or No Favicon
A favicon is the icon displayed in the top left of a browser window. When it comes to your website’s identity, it’s crucial. Perhaps you’re wondering why I’m hammering home the significance of branding. This is why.
Over time, a website’s identity develops. Prioritizing the goods over flashy logos and banners for social media promotion is essential. However, this should not be taken as an excuse to ignore branding. People won’t give your stuff a second glance if your branding is boring. So, to sum up:
Work on your brand’s identity once you have a respectable volume of material prepared. Invest both time and money on it. Don’t hire a five dollar graphic designer if you can avoid it; most of them are just starting out and are after your money. The same emblem that identifies your product or website can also serve as your social media profiles. It is recommended that the favicon and logo be the same. Your site’s reputation will benefit from this, too. Numerous free favicons are available on sites like IconFinder in case you need a quick fix for a tiny project.
25. Leaving Default Posts In Place
WordPress’s primary goal is to simplify the process of creating content for the web. WordPress, following in these footsteps, generates a couple of sample objects right after installation is complete. These examples are provided to help you get started with WordPress by showing you how various elements should look. Some of them are:
- Writing up a “Hello World” entry.
- For example, here’s a “Sample Page”
- Responding to the “Hello World” entry.
- The “Hello World” entry will be filed under “Uncategorized,” the blog’s catch-all category.
Before submitting your site for indexing, these samples should be removed. Thousands of websites make the mistake of not removing the sample content and page. As a result, all this information is available across thousands of different websites.
Obviously, that’s not good. Have any idea why? Well, there are mostly two causes:
Your search engine optimization (SEO) is suffering since you are (unintentionally) hosting duplicate content. They can be deemed spam in some circles, give off a very unprofessional vibe, and show your visitors that you don’t take their business seriously.The example posts should be removed immediately if they have not already been. You can manually submit a de-index request to Google by visiting Google Webmaster Central and selecting the desired sample pages from the list of indexed pages. This will hasten the rate at which the page is removed from your site’s index.
26. Publishing Incomplete Posts
WordPress will ping several search engines as a post is published, and they will begin indexing your site shortly after. After a page has been indexed, it may be a while before it is indexed again. Your website’s popularity is also a factor. You could add new content to your post during this time, but it wouldn’t appear until much later. Your search engine optimization efforts will suffer greatly as a result of this.
People who encounter your site through social media will not stick around if they see incomplete content; in fact, they may begin to intentionally avoid it.
It’s not always feasible to release all of your content at once. It’s possible that there’s too much material and/or not enough time. You can try out different publishing strategies and timetables to see what fits in best with your site’s intended audience.
27. Ignoring the Need for RWD
Google’s search results now give more weight to sites that are optimized for mobile use. Sites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices will soon be punished. These days, even the premium WordPress themes are responsive on mobile devices, and that includes the free ones.
28. Not Using Child Themes
WordPress novices, at least at first, lack the coding expertise to alter the theme’s aesthetic. A child theme for WordPress is a modification of the parent theme. It takes on the characteristics of the parent theme and adds on top of them with its own tweaks. (You, naturally, will be writing the code for the adjustments).
Let’s pretend you’re not employing a child theme. You are making changes to the base theme itself. Let’s say you wish to change the theme’s layout and font family. The theme’s stylesheet.css and functions.php files would be your first stops for customization. This is the crux of the issue.
Whether it’s fixing problems, making the theme faster, getting rid of unused features, or adding in new ones, standard WordPress themes are continually updated. You should update your WordPress theme just as regularly as you update WordPress itself.
Any changes made to a child theme will be overwritten when the parent theme is updated. Your customized theme won’t look the same once you apply the update. Therefore, while making modifications to your theme, a child theme should always be used.
All of the parent theme’s code is automatically imported into the child theme. You can change or add properties (such the font family) as needed. Since inherited properties don’t need to be changed, they revert to their previous values (as defined in the parent theme).
Advantage
- A file is maintained for all of the theme customizations you make.
- New options become available in your child theme as soon as the parent theme is updated.
- You get the upgrades without sacrificing any custom settings.
- WordPress makes creating child themes a breeze. For further information, check out WordPress’s official documentation.
29. Not Leveraging WordPress Caching
Your WordPress site will operate faster and use less server resources if you enable caching. Google prioritizes pages that load quickly in search results. In addition, your visitors will appreciate the minimal strain on your server that is created by serving them a quick website. This works wonderfully in situations when users share the server’s resources. We have an entire series of posts dedicated to caching in WordPress, detailing its features, functionality, and implementation.
30. Comment Moderation
Only under the following conditions do responses begin to trickle in on day one:
- Reddit and Digg have chosen to highlight your article.
- Goes Viral On The Internet
- You tell everyone of your loved ones about your new blog.
- You have a large email list from which you can promote your new site.
A consistent stream of feedback takes time to achieve in any other context. How interesting your postings are and how you wrap them up also play a role. Once people start leaving comments, though, you should start regulating them. For assistance, consider the following suggestions:
Put in place a plugin to combat spam, such as Akismet. A comment management plugin, such as Disqus or Livefyre, is another option. You won’t need any other social login plugins because of this.
Don’t give the green light to every comment that comes your way. Check out the feedback. To avoid detection as link bait, the commenter’s name should be changed. Thanks, I found this extremely interesting, coming from an account with the name “best hair spa boston” is usually indicative of a well-tuned bot (used for mass commenting).
When the spam inbox or the comments section gets too full, clear it out. Since WordPress stores all comments, spam or not, this will make your database smaller.
31. Indexing your Site after Installation
WordPress provides a little check box labeled “Allow Search Engines to index my site” during the final stages of installation. Right now, you probably don’t have any content that needs indexing. There is a good likelihood that you will alter aspects such as tags and categories even if you have meticulously prepared everything.
We recommend clearing the checkbox during setup. Turn it back on once you have two or three posts ready to go live. To enable this, navigate to the WP Admin Menu > Settings > Reading > Allow Search Engines to index my site. Don’t rush to hit “publish” once you’re finished!
Register your site manually with Google or Bing Webmaster Central. After the request has been sent in, you can go back and make the update public. Pinging search engines is how WordPress notifies them of a new post.
This is more of a recommendation gleaned from actual experience. Search engines are excellent at determining which parts of your site are most important. They will delete the post or page if they realize it’s missing information. This is meant solely to help you get a jump on your new venture.
Conclusion:
The best time to prevent an error is before it happens. No matter how experienced you are with WordPress, you may still encounter some difficulties. Learning from the errors of others is preferable to making the same ones yourself. While it’s easier said than done, maybe you’ll be able to steer clear of these WordPress blunders in the process of creating your website.
Why should I implement SEO best practices on my WordPress site?
Implementing SEO best practices on your WordPress site helps improve your website’s visibility on search engines. Optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, using relevant keywords, and other SEO techniques increase your site’s chances of being discovered by users, driving organic traffic and improving search engine rankings.
What issues can arise from overloading a WordPress site with unnecessary plugins?
Overloading a WordPress site with unnecessary plugins can negatively impact its performance. Each plugin adds extra code, increasing the loading time of your website. This can result in slow page load times, decreased user experience, and potential conflicts between plugins. It’s important to choose and install only the necessary plugins and regularly evaluate and remove any unused or redundant ones.
