Out of the 1 million most visited sites that are run on CMS, 55% of them are running on WordPress. It is one of the finest CMS available which is robust and easy to use. WordPress remains a favorite among other CMS’s because it supports multi-users and multi-blogging apart from being a free open-source platform.
Building a website using WordPress can be exciting but committing some common mistakes can cause a lot of rework. Take a look to know the top mistakes to avoid.
With so many options available to you with WordPress, it’s easy to commit mistakes ranging from trivial to disastrous. But when you hire the best Web Design & Development Company there are very few chances of going wrong.
Here are the most common WordPress mistakes and how you can avoid them:
Incorrect selection of the platform
Signing up to build your first WordPress site can be a puzzling experience for you. You have a choice between two WordPress platforms, i.e., wordpress.com and wordpress.org. If you are a blogger or an artist and are not wanting to spend any money on creating your personal space online to display your creations, then wordpress.com can be your choice. Even though the WordPress.com platform is free of cost but certain features like – custom domain names and customizable themes are not available. WordPress.org, on the other hand, comes with increased control and responsibilities. It allows you to customize your website or blog completely and lets you choose your customized domain name and hosting providers.
Not updating and backing up
In 2020 alone, WordPress released 6 upgrades out of which 4 were security or maintenance releases. This means that a bug or a security exposure was identified, and WordPress released a fix for it. So, if you find updating releases a boring task then you need to pull up your socks. Missing any important release may expose you to a risk of bugs, hacking, or a site crash. But before updating the release it is very important to create a backup. Just in case anything goes wrong you can immediately restore data from the backup, and you can have your site up and running within minutes using the latest backup.
Not changing the Default Permalink Structure
A permalink is a permanent static hyperlink to a specific page on the site. WordPress automatically creates a numeric permalink every time a new page is created, something like- www.site.com/?p=50. For better online visibility remember to change the default permalink into a more SEO- friendly structure to gain high rankings in SERPs. An SEO-friendly permalink displays efficiency and gives your brand value a boost.
To change your default permalink structure, you need to go to the Dashboard>Settings > Permalinks.
Not updating salts and keys
Salts and keys are security features provided by WordPress. They safeguard your site against hackers. Updating your salts and keys will force all logged-in users to re-login because changing them automatically invalidates the login of any user logged in. Existing keys are hard to crack and change them often adds up to another layer of difficulty.
Using The Default Username – ‘Admin’
Raise your hands if your username is ‘admin’. This is an indication that you have a weak password as well. Hackers are probably waiting to break into your website if they haven’t already.
We know that WordPress creates the ‘admin username by default. But you can change it. You can change it while installing WordPress. If you hate your website only then you must leave it as is. A word of caution, you must never use ‘admin’ as your username. And after that, your next task is to create difficult passwords, so that hackers do not even think of breaking into you secure website.
Such mistakes are not committed when you hire the best Web Design & Development Company like Digital White Labels. They are committed to providing the best services and security for your website.
Not Optimizing Your Website’s SEO
You may have a wonderful website but if you do not optimize it for search engines, sadly your website will be practically non-existent. If your website is not optimized search engines would not be able to find your website, neither would your future customers. Hence, implementing some basic SEO to your WordPress website is absolutely necessary if you want your business to succeed.
But when you hire the best web development agency like https://digitalwhitelabels.com/services/seo/ you will not have to worry about such issues. Digital White Labels agency is committed to the growth of your website and makes sure that not only your website looks amazing, but it is SEO optimized to give you an edge over your competitors.
Not Taking Care Of Your Website Speed
Your website’s speed is one of the most crucial factors that determine the ranking of your website on search engines. Website speed is not a new parameter that Google takes into account to rank your website. It has been taken into account since 2010, and it has even expanded to mobile search in 2018.
Websites that open faster offer an overall positive user experience to the customers who visit them. In simple words Google and users both dislike slow loading websites. Therefore, if you take care of your website’s speed, you can stop visitors from fleeing your website and prevent them from reaching your competitors’ site instead.
The easiest way to optimize your website speed is to install one of them may available WordPress Caching Plugins. Another way to improve the speed of your website is to optimize your images for the internet.
Optimizing your images involves reducing the image size before uploading them. This will take the unnecessary load off your website and improve its speed as a result.
Not Integrating Google Analytics
Unless you are analyzing data, it is quite impossible for your website to achieve peak performance. May business owners know nothing about their website’s traffic sources, conversion, top-performing content, how users navigate, and so on.
The best and easiest way to gain more insight into your business is through Google Analytics.
Ask your web development agency to install a Google Analytics plugin on your WordPress site.
You will learn more about your customer’s behavior, events, shopping cart data, and conversion metrics. You can use all this information to improve your website and target your traffic accordingly.
Final Words
Therefore, now that you know the common mistakes to avoid while developing portals on the WordPress platform, you can avoid committing them. You will get better with practice and will find that every site you build will be better than the previous one in some way. Even when mistakes are made, experience is a great teacher.
