How To Avoid These 12 Common Mistakes

How To Avoid These 12 Common WordPress Mistakes

WordPress is a great platform to build your website with. However, since it has a relatively low knowledge barrier to creating a website, many beginners make the same mistakes. To avoid frustration in the early stages of your web design career, you must avoid these beginner mistakes.

Who Makes Mistakes?

Everyone makes mistakes. Oscar Wilde says it very nicely: “Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes”. Experience is a great teacher, and everyone learns from their mistakes. However, it is much more efficient to learn from the mistakes of others.

This post will showcase the twelve most common WordPress mistakes you’ll want to avoid, so you can have a beautiful functioning site instead of one that screams amateur!

Not Creating a WordPress Backup is only when we need a backup, and we don’t have one that we realise their importance. Therefore, we advise all WordPress website owners to create backups, including your database.

There are different ways to create backups – via your control panel backing up all the site files and database or via a backup plugin that you will be able to control in the admin section of your WordPress website.

A plugin we use for backups is called Updraft and is a great option to create an easy-to-use backup and restore point for WordPress, themes and plugins. There is a free version and a premium option. The free version is pretty good, but it might be worth shelling out for the premium version, depending on your requirements.

If you want to know more, please have a read of our ‘how to back up your website here.

1. Ignoring WordPress Updates

At one time or another, we have all been afraid of updates. Sometimes, we forget to update our sites because we are not managing them properly. This can bite you big time if there is a security vulnerability and your site gets hacked.

The longer you wait to update your website, the harder it becomes. For example, upgrading your plugins from version 1.1 to version 4.6.9 will likely cause issues elsewhere on your site.

Upgrading from one version to the next (1.1 to 1.2, for example) is not very hard. 99 times out of 100, it simply takes one click. Of course, your site will work if your theme and plugins are coded properly. But again, it’s always good to have backups.

2. Too Many Categories

WordPress makes it easy for users to create categories. So often, this is why people get carried away and create categories for just about every post. We have all been down this path before, only to learn and change everything to add proper structure to our sites.

Too many different categories is an easy way to complicate the navigation around your site, on the front and in the admin section.

3. Not Setting Up Your Permalinks

For the longest time, people would use the default URL structure. This would mean the address for your web page would look something like this: www.website-address.co.uk/?p=23.

Not only is this bad for SEO, but it is also bad for users.

When installing WordPress, update your permalinks structure by going to Settings » Permalinks. We tend to go with the post structure. This makes the URL the page title that you choose, making it much more influential for SEO purposes.

This post, for example, has a URL name of “interact-digital.co.uk/how-to-avoid-these-12-common-mistakes” rather than interact-digital.co.uk/p?135

4. Ignoring SEO Settings

On the initial install of WordPress, you are given the option to ‘prevent search engines from indexing your site. This can be a useful feature whilst developing your website. However, once the site is ready, it is often not turned back on, meaning the site doesn’t get indexed.

This is, unfortunately, quite common and is only discovered months later when the website is getting no traffic via Google. By the time it is fixed, it can take another few months before Google has indexed all of your content, delaying your progress significantly.

Read our post on learning the basics of SEO here. Then, let us know what you think.

Not Installing an SEO plugin WordPress is a great platform for SEO straight off the bat, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be better! Page titles and meta descriptions are automatically generated from the page content. However, you will need a plugin like WordPress SEO by Yoast to customise these.

A plugin like this will also allow you to monitor the page’s SEO and create a sitemap automatically that you can then upload to webmaster tools.

7. Not Having a Contact Form

If you have your email address and a phone number listed for the contact details, you may have noticed a big increase in spam emails to the email address you are advertising. Bots scrape websites looking for email addresses in plain text that they can add to a spam list and send unsolicited mail. Just offering an email address can also lead to emails that do not contain any information you need. 

Contact forms are pre-defined boxes that allow you to request information that you can use to help identify issues or sales enquiries to provide a better service or more accurate quote. In addition, the contact form can have security features such as a captcha service to help filter out bots and reduce the spam in your inbox.

You can choose from hundreds of different contact form plugins, but the one we recommend for a simple contact form is contact form 7.

8. Not Installing Analytics

Google Analytics gives you tons of information about your website and the visitor metrics that go along with it, allowing you to see the area that can be improved and worked upon, as well as giving you a monitoring platform to view any previous changes worked.

Google Analytics is free and relatively simple to install. Many automated reports can also be created so you can stay informed of your site’s progress. 

We also recommend using Google webmaster tools (now called search console) for a more in-depth understanding of how your SEO is performing.

9. Just Another Blog Tagline

WordPress, by default, adds a tagline “Just Another Blog” to every WordPress install. However, often beginners don’t know about it, so they don’t change it until they realise it is being indexed in Google. You can change the tagline by going to Settings » General.

10. Failing to Moderate Comments

When developers set up sites for small businesses, they often fail to provide proper training. This results in their clients not knowing how to manage their WordPress sites. By the time they realise, they have tons of work to do. For example, you can disable comments in the settings » discussion for new pages or posts. Alternatively, if you choose ‘quick edit’ on the post or page you want to remove comments from, you will see a checkbox to disable pings and comments.

Comments can be a great feature. However, a lot of monitoring will be needed to weed through the amount of spam sent along with your readers’ genuine comments.

11. Not Saving Images for the Web

When designing a website, there is not much time spent acknowledging the size of images you upload. Images from a digital camera are often unnecessarily huge (at least for web use). A few of these on a page will start to grind down on the speed of your page load and quickly use up storage space.

The more experienced the user, the more we realise that these images can be optimised to speed up page load (a factor in SEO rankings) and save space. ‘Save for web’ in Photoshop applications is a great resource, often more than halving image memory size without altering the quality of the image. Other free tools on the web will do the same job GIMP (free software) and JPEG mini is two options.

This can be taken further with more web-friendly image types (such as WebP) now being accommodated. This reduces the size of your image by a lot. We often see images that originally were over 4Mb be reduced to less than 50Kb.

12. Ignoring Security

Many WordPress users don’t consider their websites’ security until they get hacked. (Similar to backups!).

We install the Wordfence plugin on our sites to monitor suspicious website visits and block certain IP addresses. We also recommend a 2-factor authentication login to prevent brute force attacks and keep multiple backups.

We hope this post answers some of your questions and will help you on the road to making a great WordPress website! Also, if you have any other suggestions for a ‘How To’ with a WordPress blog, or if you think we are missing a common WordPress mistake, please let us know by filling in the web form underneath.