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8 Common WordPress Mistakes You Should Aware Of

We all know that WordPress powers around 39% of all websites on the internet. It’s one of the most user-friendly platforms with an intuitive dashboard and a wide array of options to customize your website. But just because it’s flexible, doesn’t mean it’s entirely foolproof. When it comes to creating and managing a WordPress website, not only beginners but also WordPress experts might sometimes make some common mistakes that can have a major impact on your site’s ability to rank. So, if you are going to build a WordPress website, it is ideal to become familiar with those mistakes and learn how to avoid the issues.

In this article, we will point out the 8 most common WordPress mistakes that everyone should be aware of. By checking the list, you’ll not only be able to stop mistakes before they happen but also if you’re already making them you can take the proper steps to fix them.

1. Choosing the Wrong Platform:

Most of the users who want to start their first website on WordPress often choose the wrong platform. Because there are two types of WordPress, one is WordPress.com and another is WordPress.org. Most of beginners do not know the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Both of the platforms have their own pros and cons which makes it a little confusing for new users. To stay away from this one of most common WordPress mistakes, it is extremely crucial to know the difference between the two of them and choose the correct one for your WordPress.

WordPress.com is a free WordPress platform that is ideal for beginners. If you want to start a hobby blog, you might consider using WordPress.com. It gives you limited opportunities for monetization and long-term growth.

On the other hand, if you want to build a business website with self-hosting, go for WordPress.org. It’s an open-source platform that offers massive growth potential. It will give you access to all the features that you might need in building as well as managing a website.

2. Choosing the Wrong Host:

The host is the foundation of your site. In order to maintain a good presence on the web, you need to have good hosting for your website. So, building a website with low quality can be a major reason for its low reach. But most business owners see the value of creating and sharing amazing content, and selecting a decent web host often ends up as the lowest priority. They often forget, neglecting to choose the right host not only has disastrous effects on your website but also on your business. While choosing a website hosting provider, consider the features such as technical support, security, load times, and automatic backups. There are tons of hosts out there waiting for you. Spend time researching different hosts and reading reviews to decide which is the right fit for your business.

3. Not Backing Up WordPress:

Almost every website on the internet is prone to accidents, your website can be lost due to human mistakes, theft, hacking attempts, and other disasters. Even your site can crash because of excess traffic, server problems, or other technical glitches. That means you will permanently lose all of your valuable content on your website. So, there is no mistake that could be bigger than being not prepared for those situations and forgetting to take a backup of your WordPress site.

Having a backup doesn’t cost you anything but saves your time, money, suffering and your WordPress site. There are several WordPress backup plugins you can choose from. Even some hosting provider also offers backup service. But keeping your backups on the server means they’re also gone if you lose your website data. So choose a WordPress plugin that let you save backups to a service like Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, or Google Drive. Also, schedule backup depending on how frequently you modify your website but at the very least, it should run weekly.

4. Picking the Wrong Theme:

A theme decides how your WordPress site is gonna look. It visually represents your site content and has a huge impact on the success of your website. So choosing the perfect theme in the very beginning is very important. When you don’t choose the right one at the right time and jump from theme to theme, it actually hurt your Google rankings and can even confuse the Google website crawlers. However, there is no perfect WordPress theme. You just need to find one that best suits your business from the tons of paid and free themes. But how you would know which one is the best for you? Check the Things to Keep on Your Mind Before Choosing WordPress Theme and you’ll get the answer.

5. Install Unnecessary Plugins:

WordPress offers various plugins to extend the functionality or add new features to your website. While plugins can prove to be very effective in running your site, using too many can lead to a variety of problems. Every single plugin you upload and activate takes up space, so using too many of them may slow down your site and lead to a poor user experience. To avoid such a situation, you should aim for quality over quantity. Although there is no set rule on what the ideal number of plugins is, it is wise to only install the plugins you absolutely need. To find your unused plugins, check your plugins manually or you can go for a plugin like Plugin Activation Status to get the list of unused plugins. Once you identify which plugins aren’t being used, simply “delete” them.

6. Installing Poorly Coded plugins:

As with unused plugins, poorly coded plugins can also cause site crashes, security breaches, and slow load times—all. To prevent your site from those problems you need to keep a few things in mind before installing plugins. First, make sure that the plugins you choose come from the official WordPress.org plugin repository. Secondly, look for plugins that are updated weekly or at least monthly. Also, always check the customer reviews and the “Support” tab for each plugin description. If the tab doesn’t take you to a forum or support page, don’t download the plugin.

7. Ignoring Updates:

Updates are a part of technology. Like any other software, WordPress versions keep on rolling from time to time. Those updates deal with new security threats and functionality issues, and they can also include exciting new features. Not only WordPress core, WordPress themes and plugins also release regular updates that contain codes to fix holes in a plugin’s security. And when you wait too long to update, you can leave your site vulnerable to the security issues the update was supposed to fix. This common WordPress mistake can have devastating consequences because these updates patch not only performance, design, and usability issues, but also security holes that may give hackers the ability to get into your website. So you should update to the latest version of WordPress core, theme, and plugin as soon as you see one pop up.

Though Updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins are important, performing updates while your site is running live can cause some unexpected issues. By enabling the WordPress maintenance mode, you can do whatever you want to your website in a safe environment. But again, before making any changes to the live site it’s best to make a backup.

8. Not Using Child Theme:

No matter what type of WordPress theme you choose, there will likely come a time when you’ll want to customize it. Using a child theme in WordPress gives you the ability to make modifications and keep them separated from the parent theme. One of the biggest problems with modifying a parent theme is when updates occur. Most of the time, these updates will erase any changes you make. This means you’ll have to code them all over again. Child themes make it possible to customize the parent theme itself without touching the core files. So when you use a child theme, your customizations are stored in the child theme and won’t be lost when you update the parent. This means you’ll still get benefit from the update, but your changes will remain.

Conclusion:

WordPress is a great tool to build a website and manage it, but you need to keep yourself alert to get the best out of your website. Hope this article going to help you to save yourself from being fall victim to these above-mentioned common WordPress mistakes. If you have more common WordPress mistakes to add to the list, leave a comment below.

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