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Starting a website or a blog today has never been easier to those without coding experience. From choosing a web host to creating the site itself, everything’s doable by yourself. One CMS platform that’s often been used by beginners is WordPress since it’s quite easy to use and get started.
However, just because WordPress has been carefully designed and meticulously coded to help any first-timer, it doesn’t mean you’re not prone to making mistakes that can harm your website in the long run.
If you want to make sure that your WordPress runs smoothly, then these are the popular WordPress mistakes that you need to avoid as a beginner.
Using admin as your username
Security is important when you’re running a website or an eCommerce store. Practicing smart shared hosting security techniques is a must if you want to protect yourself from hackers. Unfortunately, the biggest security that beginners often make is at the beginning.
And that is to use “admin” as their WordPress username.
When you log on to a WordPress website, you’ll both a username and a password. That’s basically like having two locks on a door. If you leave your username as “admin”, you’re basically leaving one door unlocked for hackers.
Make sure you change your username as soon as your WordPress account is created. If you need help changing your username, here’s how you can do it easily:
- Login to your wp-admin dashboard with the “admin” account and create a new full-administrator user with a different username.
- Log out of the “admin” account and log back in with the new account you’ve created.
- Make sure you attribute all the necessary details and content from the old “admin” user to the new user that you’ve created. Then finally, delete the old “admin” account.
Not having a WordPress Backup
Don’t have a backup for your WordPress website? You have a big problem. Backups are important to have for anyone starting a blog or a website as they function as an insurance in case anything bad happens.
Sure, things like have your website attacked by hackers doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, you’re going to regret not having a regular backup of your website.
The good thing is, some hosting providers often provide automatic and regular backups, so you can just set it and forget it. However, not all host provide this service, so if you have to do the backups yourself, try using a WordPress plugin such as Duplicator or BackUpBuddy.
Choosing the right host
Not all web hosts are created equal. Some might be great for WordPress sites, some might not. However, it’s important that you don’t choose your web host just because they are cheap or that offer free web hosting services.
WordPress is a specialized platform and if you want the best performance for your website, you need to find web hosts that are good with WordPress. Philmorehost offers Cloud VPS Hosting that built specific for WordPress platform. You can get great features and high server performance at reasonable prices.
Not updating your WordPress
People tend to fear updating their WordPress platform as the update might not be compatible with the current features on their site or worse, cause them to lose data and content. But the fact is, updates are important if you want to improve the speed, performance, usability and management, compatibility, and security.
We always recommend that you update your WordPress as soon as a new version is available. You can even set it up to update automatically so that you don’t have to do the installation yourself.
You leave yourself open to potential attacks or other vulnerabilities when you don’t update your WordPress, so make sure that you perform updates regularly.
Search Engine Friendly permalinks
Creating Search Engine Friendly, or “SEF” for short, permalinks is something that a lot of WordPress newbies forget to do. WordPress will always set your permalinks to “plain”, which is something like this mysite.com/?p=123. These types of permalinks are not great for search engines.
You definitely have to customize your permalink so that you can use to optimize your posts on social media and for SEO purposes.
Changing your permalink is super easy so you should do it anyway. Just head over to Settings, then look for the Permalinks section. There you can change the original /?p=123 link into something that fits your brand.
Using an unreliable theme
A theme can make or break a website.
Of course, there’s no one theme to rule them all as it all depends on what type of site you’re trying to make. A travel blog will need different features and applications compared to an eCommerce website.
But how do you choose the right theme? First off, you need to decide what type of website it’s going to be (i.e. blog, online store, portfolio page, etc.), then purchase the appropriate themes from reputable companies.
Make sure that you consider certain factors such as aesthetics, responsiveness, SEO compatibility, plugin support, and more, before deciding on a theme.
Conclusion
WordPress has done wonders in giving users an easy way to create and manage websites. However, it’s still easy for beginners to fall into the mistakes that we’ve listed above and not take full advantage of what the platform has to offer. If you want to know more, here are some additional tips to secure your WordPress.
Now that you know what mistakes to avoid when on WordPress, it’s time to take a look at how you can improve your website search presence.
Originally posted on May 23, 2018 @ 9:44 am
