7 Mistakes That You Should Avoid While Setting Up a WordPress Site

WordPress is a website platform that over 60 million websites have used. WordPress offers easy to use tools and features for creating, managing, and designing your website or blog. You can easily create a professional-looking site with WordPress because of its many themes and plugins. With the addition of social media integration, you have an all-in-one solution for blogging on any topic related to your niche market. If you’re considering starting a new blog or building out your current one, consider using this free software, as it will allow you to focus on what’s important: content creation.

WordPress websites are the best and easiest way to get your company’s message out there. However, not everything is perfect with WordPress, and you should be aware of some mistakes that people make so you don’t fall for them too.

Many people use WordPress for their websites, and it’s a great choice. However, there are some mistakes that many new users make when they first get started. Here we’ll cover the most common errors in detail so you can prevent them from happening to yourself.

We can make several mistakes when we run a WordPress website, and in this post, we are going to share with you the most common ones. If you avoid these pitfalls, your site will be much more successful.

So, what mistakes should you avoid when working with WordPress?

Mistake #1: Not Choosing a Reliable Web Host

One of the most common reasons people fail to get their site up and running is that they choose a cheap host that can’t handle high traffic or won’t scale well. This means that if your site becomes popular, you may have to move it to a more powerful web host or share resources with other sites hosted on the same server.

You should also avoid hosts that put their own branding in your site’s control panel and affect performance, such as GoDaddy. Every time you get hacked, this is usually because of some security vulnerability in the control panel.

Also, avoid hosts with slow servers and poor customer service. If you can’t get in touch with them when your site goes down, you’ll need to manage everything yourself, and that’s never a good idea.

Mistake #2: Not Optimizing Your Images and Videos

If you use YouTube or Vimeo to upload videos, you’ll notice that the resulting file is very large and takes a long time to load. This is because these video sites add their branding and extra information, such as links back to themselves when they host your videos.

You can avoid this by using a plugin like WP Smushit, so images and files are compressed before they’re uploaded. This will reduce the size of your images, so they load faster in visitors’ browsers.

Mistake #3: Not Using SSL For Your WordPress Site

One mistake that many people make is not using SSL when running an e-commerce site or any kind of website dealing with sensitive information, such as credit cards. As is the case with many hosting providers, you pay extra for an SSL certificate. With WP Engine, it’s free if you host your site on their platform.

If you want to use SSL to secure your website, ensure that the web host you choose supports it. You can easily check this by looking for a padlock symbol at the beginning of your browser’s address bar. If you see it, SSL is supported, and you can use it on your site to secure the connection between visitors and your website’s servers.

Mistake #4: Not Using a Monetization Platform

If you’re running a WordPress site that contains affiliate links or product reviews for any kind of monetizable content, you’ll need to use a monetization platform. There are many available, but the one that’s most often recommended is called Easy Digital Downloads.

If you want to make money from your site using information or products you review or recommend, this software will easily allow you to do it. Other popular plugins include WooCommerce and Share Your Thoughts.

Mistake #5: Not Using a Security Plugin

If you’re running an eCommerce site, blog, or any other type of WordPress website that gets traffic, there’s always the risk that your servers will be hacked. To help prevent this from happening, you should use two plugins to protect your site: file integrity monitoring and malware scanners.

File integrity monitoring will alert you if someone changes the code of your WordPress site so you can take action immediately. You can easily set this up using a WP Security Audit Log plugin, but make sure it’s updated frequently to keep up with all the latest security patches.

Malware is another major threat to any site running on WordPress. You can protect your site against these threats using a plugin called Wordfence Security. This free plugin will scan every file downloaded to your site, and it’ll alert you if something seems out of the ordinary.

Mistake #6: Not Using Auto Updates

WordPress is constantly being updated with new security patches, so if you wait for your web host to do it, you’re going to be very vulnerable to hackers. WordPress updates are also necessary whenever a new version of the software is released. You can set up automatic updates using a plugin like WP Engine and JetPack, so you don’t have to stay on top of these updates yourself.

Mistake #7: Not Using CDN

Cloudflare is a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for your WordPress site. A CDN houses copies of all the files that make up your website, and it’ll serve them to visitors from servers located around the world. This reduces the lag time for people visiting your site because their requests won’t have to travel as far to reach your hosting servers.

CDN also speeds up your site because it can serve files directly from the CDN’s servers without going through your WordPress hosting provider or load balancer first. So if you use a plugin like OneSignal Push Notifications to send out email blasts or other types of notifications, you’ll see an improvement in the delivery rate.

How to Fix them?

So now you know the seven mistakes, big and small, that can kill your WordPress site. The question is, how do you go about fixing them? If you’re trying to fix a mistake your web host made, it’s a good idea to look for another one. It’s not worth waiting around for an incompetent or negligent hosting company to get their act together, and God knows that the hosting market has no shortage of options.

If you’re trying to fix a mistake you made because you didn’t do enough research, then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. There are thousands of articles out there on setting up your WordPress site properly, so take some time to go through them carefully. If you can’t find the information you need, just reach out to your web host or an SEO expert.

As for mistakes that others made because they used bad plugins or themes, the only solution is to stop using them. This is easier said than done, of course, but fortunately, there are plenty of great alternatives out there that will do the job properly.

It won’t take you long to fix your mistakes, but just remember that they can have a huge impact on your website’s success. It doesn’t matter how great your website is if it’s not up when people try to visit it or if it gets hacked within a few weeks of launching. So just take the time to do it right, and you’ll thank yourself later.