8 Common Mistakes to Avoid in WordPress

8 Common Mistakes to Avoid in WordPress

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What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open source content management system (CMS) that can be used to create a website or blog. WordPress was originally designed by Matt Mullenweg for use on his blog, "Mullenweg.com". It is the most popular blogging platform in use today, powering over 60 million websites.

WordPress was originally designed as a blogging tool, but it has evolved into a fully-fledged CMS that can be used to power any type of website from an online resume to a full-blown ecommerce site.

1. Choosing the best wordpress version to host your website

WordPress.org is the original WordPress website, and it's designed for self-hosted blogs. It includes all of the features of WordPress but requires you to host your own site on your own web server (such as with Bluehost).

WordPress.com is a free hosting service that allows you to create a blog with limited features: it includes some of the most popular plugins, themes, and services available on WordPress but does not offer access to all of them (such as Jetpack).

2. Choosing the best website hosting company

Choosing a hosting company is no easy task. There are so many providers out there with different features and pricing plans. But it doesn't need to be a difficult decision if you know what you're looking for.

If the website will only be accessed by a few people, then you don't need anything too fancy and can go with something cheaper like Bluehost or Hostgator.

If the site will have more traffic, then it's best to go with something that offers more bandwidth and storage like Siteground or DreamHost.

3. Always Choose the Right WordPress Theme

Choosing the right WordPress theme is a crucial step in the process of setting up a website. The theme will determine how your site looks and what features it will have. You also have to take into account your business needs, target audience and the type of website you want.

WordPress themes are generally classified into two categories:

  • Free themes: These are often called “premium themes” because they have no cost associated with them. This is a good option for small businesses that don’t need much customization or for bloggers who don’t want to invest in their blog design. Some free themes are Astra, Kadence or Neve that come with different website templates.
  • Premium themes: These are more expensive than free themes but offer all sorts of features like customizing colors, fonts and layouts as well as additional add-ons.

4. Install SEO Plugins

There are many different plugins available for WordPress, but some of the most popular ones include Yoast, All in One Schema, and Google Analytics by MonsterInsights.

All three plugins will help you improve your website’s rankings by helping you make changes to your content, titles, and meta descriptions. They can also be used to monitor the performance of your site over time.

Yoast is the most popular plugin on this list because it is easy to use and has many features that can help you optimize your site’s SEO performance.

5. Set up a Contact Form

Contact form is a very important part of any website. It helps you to get in touch with the company directly and also helps the users to get their queries resolved. There are many plugins available for Contact Forms on Wordpress. The most popular one is Contact Form 7. It is a free plugin, easy to use and can be integrated with any theme. You can also install the free Flamingo plugin from the same Contact Form 7 developer to manage all emails and export contact lists from all the forms.

6. Install A Security Plugin

Security plugins are a must-have for any WordPress site. There are various plugins that offer different levels of security, but for the most part, they all provide some level of protection from hackers and other security threats. There are two main types of plugins: those that offer protection from outside threats and those that protect against malicious code in your own site.

You can install a security plugin on Wordpress in order to keep your site safe. There are many free and paid plugins that you can use for this purpose.

  • Wordfence Security (free)
  • Sucuri Security (paid)
  • Bulletproof Security (paid)
  • All In One WP Security & Firewall (paid)

7. Set up Automatic Back-Ups

WordPress is an excellent platform for creating websites, blogs and e-commerce stores. It is easy to install and use, but it does have its drawbacks. One of the most prominent problems with WordPress is that it has a tendency to crash.

In order to avoid this problem, you need to set up automatic backups on your site. There are many plugins available for this purpose, but we recommend BackupBuddy. It is the most reliable plugin and it also offers a lot of other useful features like restoring files and database backups.

8. WordPress Updates

It is important to keep WordPress up to date. This will ensure that you are not vulnerable to security threats, and you can benefit from new features and improvements that the developers have made.

There are two ways to update WordPress. One is to use the built-in automatic updater and the other is to manually update WordPress.

The automatic updater checks for updates and installs them on its own. It can be set up to check for updates at certain intervals, or it can be set up to install all available updates when a new version of WordPress is released.

If you do not want the automatic updater, manually update WordPress by downloading the latest version from WordPress.org website, uploading it onto your server via an FTP client, and then activating it on your site by logging in and navigating to "Updates" > "Update Now".

Conclusion

Building a wordpress website doesn't have to be a difficult task if you avoid all the mistakes listed above from the onset.


Caroline Njoki

Digital Marketing Coach at Digital Elevator Network

At Digital Elevator Network, we specialize in training online business owners, students, and marketing professionals on how to massively increase traffic and sales for any website as quickly as possible. We offer practical understanding of core digital marketing tools to promote a product, service or brand through video courses in digital marketing, social media, SEO and WordPress website design,virtual workshops, webinars and custom training plans for teams of any size.


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