While setting up a WordPress website, you should not make any mistakes that may drive your site into future trouble. Configuring a website with WordPress is easy. But building a site is not all about installing WordPress, add some plugins & themes, and publish random posts, pages, etc.
Sometimes you may forget to complete some critical tasks while constructing your site. The recommendation here is to give more focus on these vital points and try not to miss them.
There are many common mistakes that we do at the beginning of building our sites that ultimately block the road towards growth.
For webmasters, who are familiar with WordPress. It won’t be hard to notice these key points, however, if you are a beginner. It’s going to be beneficial because even if these mistakes don’t return some typical code errors, they hamper the ultimate growth of the site.
So especially for beginners, it will be beneficial to be precise while creating an excellent website.
7 Mistakes to Avoid While Setting Up a WordPress Site
In this article, we bring up some of the mistakes that you should avoid while setting up a WordPress site.
Not Setting Up Automated Backup
First thing first, websites are ultimately codes and documents hosted on a cloud server. These files are vulnerable to many prospective. There may be an occurrence of self-made mistakes inside the codes or threat created by 3rd parties.
In such a case, if you lose your data or important files, then those data are forever gone and will ask for a lot of time and energy to recreate again unless you do not have a backup. Most of the time it’s almost impossible to regain lost data or files if you do not keep a backup yourself.
To being prepared for a horrible situation, you should activate an automated backup so that the process automatically backup all your contents and files periodically. Setting up an automatic backup is easier than you think because various numbers of automated plugins are available, as well as the default backup tool available in web hosting.
Updraft, VaultPress, BackupBuddy are the favorites when it comes to WordPress backup plugins. As you might have known, plugins play a vital part when it comes to managing a website. They make your site flexible by assigning more functionality. So a suitable backup plugin will help you to fix this automated backup issue.
A Quick Note: You should not over install unnecessary plugins just to overload your server and slow down the website performance. It’s better to check the performance after installing a plugin, and there is not much negative impact on loading time, then you can go with that plugin.
Generally, the backup plugins store data or files on the hosting storage. It would be better if you can store backups in secure cloud storage rather than a hosting server. There is other cloud storage available such as Cloudinary, Google Drive, Pcloud, Mega, etc.
There is no issue with storing your backups on the WebHost. Though, in any case, if you lose access to your WebHost, then the backup files will be lost as well. Alternatively, you can download the backup to your local computer too.
Not Optimizing Site for SEO
As a blogger, you should know how important SEO is to boost your site content on the search engine. Not only increasing visibility on the search engine but also it helps to drive targeted traffic towards your site.
Some bloggers do not correctly work on the SEO of their site. Search engine optimization drives higher traffic, especially from search engines to your website, if you focus more on enhancing it. The more traffic from search engines comes to your site, the value of your page increases.
Learning SEO may take some time, but it entirely worth acquiring this skill. If you are not doing SEO with your content and pages, then I am not sure how fast you can grow your site, but that not any time soon.
Again, SEO has two sides like a coin: On-page SEO and Off-page SEO. You have to work on both parts to improve overall site growth.
It is easy to optimize SEO nowadays because there are many optimization tools and SEO plugins available for WordPress. All you have to install a useful plugin such as Rankmath or Yoast SEO, and it will guide you to optimize your website, especially the on-page SEO.
You can take advantage of Semrush, Ahref (or any of the other SEO tools available) to work on the off-page SEO and continuously keep an eye on your site growth.
Some other plugins, like “Table of contents,” “Jetpack” can also help you to optimize your site SEO. Some tools also focus on security, which protects your site from malware activities and spam – are part of SEO as well. There are many SEO plugins available, but you should look for all in one tool to normalize the load on-site because of plugins.
Many problems a blogger may face if he doesn’t optimize SEO for a site. Without optimization, it will be quite hard to rank higher on the search engine and ultimately tricky for getting organic traffic. It is one of the common mistakes you should avoid while setting up a WordPress site.
Avoiding WordPress Upgrades
Another mistake webmasters often do by not upgrading WordPress and related themes and plugins. One of the reasons behind this is that they believe upgrading may cause problems to themes or plugins of their site. But the truth is updates are published by the developers to fix previous issues.
If you don’t update the WordPress, then your site may face security issues. Even WordPress themes and plugins also release an updated version to make your site bug free.
Until and unless you are using a self-customized theme or plugin, you can safely update them without worries. It just takes a few seconds to upgrade WordPress and related tools. During the update, your site will be on maintenance mode.
Moreover, if you do not update WordPress, then you may not be able to use a few plugins from the WordPress plugins repository. The reason behind this is, “plugins are created by declaring a particular WordPress version or a limited series.” And if you are not using the latest or up to tested version, then you will be unable to use that plugin.
Once you update your site, then your site will contain some new features as well, with extended functionality and additional features. So whenever you see any updates from WordPress, themes or plugins do go for up-gradation.
Not Selecting Suitable Plugins
You can understand the importance of plugins now. The plugin enhances the functionality of the site. For WordPress users, there are several free WordPress plugins available. You can install any as per your needs.
Plugins are created for providing a specific extension that the default WordPress does not hold. For example, optimization plugin will accelerate the site performance, Akismet will make your site spam free, Yoast SEO plugin will improve your site SEO and so on.
As a blogger, we should be concerned about the overall site, including SEO, site’s performance, design, readability to drive traffic and keep them interested on the site. Depending on all of these matrices, a site builds its growth base, and it reflects how well the site will continue to perform. The better you can optimize your website; the more traffic will come to your site.
That’s why selecting plugins and theme for a website is a crucial step where you need to be determined to choose which plugin you are going to use to give your site a proper direction. There are many plugins available in every category. If you pick up a plugin that doesn’t add all the recommended features of that category, then you should avoid those plugins.
My recommendation is to find all in one plugin for each category that provides excellent support and primary setup. It’s straightforward to find them, just look for other people’s reviews on a plugin and check the features included in it.
Before selecting plugins, you can also ask your friends how they will rate it, does it fulfill your needs and of course the security of using the plugins. WordPress repository is the most reliable plugin source because they verify each the plugins when developers add one to the library.
After installing the plugin, make sure you test site performance by using tools like GTmetrix and Pingdom.
If the site has good page load time without any issues, then you are using the right plugin. You should not avoid these steps while choosing a plugin for your WordPress site.
Not Using Google Analytics
To grow your business, you need to understand how your site is performing in terms of traffic. How many users are visiting your website for a specific period? From where those users are coming to the site. For how long the users are surfing on your site and so on. It’s essential to track these data daily so that you can enhance your website and contents depending on these analyses.
For such tracking and decision making Google Analytics is one of the best tools that can deliver precisely what you need to know. Setting up Google Analytics is very easy as you only have to create a profile for your site and link the tracking code into your site to track site performance. You can do that by using analytics plugins available for WordPress too.
Those plugins will let you use some advanced features of Google Analytics. You can easily monitor and check the status directly from your blog even though some of them can display the traffic on-site and the positions of your content on Google. If you are concerned about not using many plugins, you can track those data on Google analytics directly.
Believe me or not, without Google Analytics, you will never know the exact site traffic, and it’s hard to make winning decisions without analyzing the previous data collection. This is, of course, one of the many mistakes people do while setting up a WordPress site.
Not Having Optimized Images
Images are another essential part of websites. They are descriptive, engaging, and make your site more interesting in terms of design too. On the other hand, images are heavy in size and can lead to slow down your page loading time. If you are using its original size, then your site may face slow loading of pages.
WordPress offers many image optimization plugins that optimize images such as ShortPixel, without compromising quality. Most of them have automatic optimization features so that whenever you upload an image to your site, it gets optimized automatically. Mentioning that I also have to tell you these tools also has the option to compress images on manual instruction.
The image optimization tools will reduce the file sizes of images by applying lossy or lossless compression techniques, which is web-friendly. Some plugins also let you convert your images to WebP format as well.
After using an image optimization plugin, you should not encounter the usual image related issues on web pages that do not make any other problem than slowing down page loading time, which is one of the most concerning issues of modern-day web development.
However, while reducing the image size, remember that images are among the most important things to display inside your content. Rather than plain text, images of content make a better understanding of visitors. So make sure you do not over compress an image and lose its displaying quality, a balanced optimization is required here.
Not Setting Up a Contact Form
Having conversations with your users makes your aim more clear of delivering demanded content. To have conversations, you need to provide your users to send their comments and suggestions via email or contact forms.
Now it is easy to interact because WordPress plugins are available for creating contact forms. The plugins will provide you with the pre-designed contact form. It will allow you to edit the contact form as per requirement.
Make sure to select a plugin for the contact form that doesn’t use cookies and ensure the security of the user’s information. In case you are skilled with codes, you can create a form on your own.
For others who need the help of a plugin, it is effortless to add the contact form on site. You only need to select a few settings and copy the shortcode of the contact form and paste it anywhere you want to display, and your contact form already working.
So, do set up a contact form for the users and avoid missing this step while publishing your site.
Final Words
In this post, I mention some of the common mistakes that people make while setting up a WordPress site. These are quite essential things you should take care because this will outline the performance of your site.
It is easy to overcome these simple mistakes; then you think as there are so many tools and plugins are available. Those tools will take care of your site’s performance and keep you updated.
Just make sure you have configured them all during the first setup, and you are done. Even if you forget to do it previously, you are never too late to do this today.
