WordPress is one of the most powerful website making platforms. WordPress is widely being used across the globe, and this is because it is quite flexible and easy to use. Now, as WordPress is easy to use, there is always a chance that you can make errors that can badly affect your website. 

You must avoid rookie mistakes, as some of these mistakes can ruin your efforts. In this post, we have listed some common mistakes that newbie developers make. Once you read about these errors, you can easily avoid them. 

There are over dozens of rookie WordPress mistakes, but here in this article, you will find the top ones!

Eight common WordPress mistakes to avoid at all costs!

Today, WordPress is one of the best content management systems. This is also why it controls over 70% of the CMS market. Now, if you are planning on trying your luck on WordPress, we suggest you read about the common mistakes discussed below. The purpose of this brief post is to make you aware of these errors so you can try and avoid them

1. Unnecessary expense on extra features

When starting a new WordPress website, you would need two things. These include your WordPress domain name and a reliable hosting service. A common error that newbie developers make is spending extra money on the services they do not need. Usually, hosting providers would upsell you multiple services when shopping for your WordPress hosting. Some of the extra features that you wouldn’t need at the start include:

• Extra email accounts
• Advanced security 
• Enhanced privacy

Web hosting services would always trap you by making these extra features look mandatory. But you have to be vigilant and intelligent enough to keep away from these expenses. Selecting a credible web hosting service is one of the best ways to save money while starting your site. 

1. Choosing the wrong platforms 

The biggest mistake, in our view, is selecting the wrong platform. There are two major WordPress platforms. These are WordPress.com and WordPress.org! New users planning on starting their first WordPress websites would always make a poor choice when it comes to selecting the right platform. This is major because most users still don’t know the difference between these two platforms. You have to choose the WordPress platform that suits your website’s requirements. 

If you want to start your blog or content-based website, you need to pick WordPress.com; on the other hand, if you are planning on creating a business website or ecommerce store, you should pick WordPress.org!

2. Picking the wrong WordPress themes

The website’s design is one of the most crucial things that you need to take care of. The design of your WordPress site is going to determine its performance. You need to know that a good design plays an important role in making your site successful. And in the same way, a bad website design can take you downhill. 

If you don’t have much experience or skills in designing, you should not try to create one yourself. You must take help from the WordPress themes available in thousands in number. Having access to thousands of different themes is tempting, but it also increases the chances of errors. A poor choice in theme selection can take your website down! So whenever you are choosing a website theme, you need to make a list of features that you want to have on your website. Match this list with the available themes and make a sensible choice.

3. Installing excessive plugins

A big reason behind the popularity of WordPress is that it helps you add to the functionality of your site by simple installations of plugins. You don’t have to hire a professional developer to add a new feature to your site as long as you have the specific plugins. Now, this ease in development also raises problems.

A big problem is the excessive selection and installation of plugins that do not align with the selected theme of your website. Installing and loading excessive plugins will slow down your site and will result in a poor user experience. So always make a wise choice when selecting plugins for your site.

4. Not optimizing media content for the site

Today we don’t need professional designers and photographers who can provide unique visual content for our WordPress websites. Instead, we can rely on smartphone cameras and capture unique images ourselves. 

Creating unique images has become easy and free, but this has introduced a new problem. The pictures that we take with our camera phones are quite large and have a different format than the recommended one for a WordPress website. 

Mobile cameras would provide you with high-resolution images that are good for printing and social media publishing, but if you use them on WordPress, then it is going to slow down your website and destroy the UI experience. 

When it comes to publishing images on WordPress, you need to make sure that you save each page as a png image. Also, it would be best if you ensured that the images were always in jpg or png format. A rookie mistake that we commonly see is adding images in PDF format. PDF format is no doubt secure, but it is not the right format for WordPress imaging. If you have a PDF image, you can easily use a PDF to png conversion tool to get a free png version. PNG images are best for WordPress websites and you can easily extract them from PDF by using the pdf converter free online resources.

5. Ignoring updates from WordPress

Ignoring updates that appear on your WordPress dashboard is a common mistake. We have seen many mature WordPress websites suspended just because they didn’t comply with the new updates. A common misconception is that new WordPress updates would result in data loss, but this is not true. You must keep your website updated which is why WordPress keeps sending you notifications for updates.

You should never disable notifications and ignore the updates. Install the update as soon as it arrives. It would help you make your site more friendly and crawlable for the search engine. 

6. Ignoring page speed optimization 

Page loading speed is very important. Today the attention span of traffic coming on the web has become very short. So slow websites would always fail to impress a visitor, resulting in increased bounce rate and spam score. Neither Google nor the traffic coming on the web is interested in slow loading websites.

So you have to ensure that you speed up your website. One of the common reasons behind a slow loading website is large-sized PDF images or pages. You can utilize an online PDF to png converter tool to enhance the speed of your site, or you can also use PDF converters on windows tools to shrink down the size of large PDF pages. 

7. Making your site live while building it

When your site is under construction, you should never make it available to the public. A common mistake that website developers make is making their sites public while building them. This makes your site look nothing but unprofessional and incomplete. In simple words, this mistake can ruin the reputation of your website. Gaining a positive DA score is quite difficult once you have lost your reputation. 

So always make sure that you don’t go live until you’re designing and construction is complete. Enable the maintenance mode when you are building your site!

Conclusion

WordPress is one of the best website builder platforms. WordPress doesn’t only help you build websites but also manage them with great ease. Being easy doesn’t mean that there is no room for mistakes, which is why I have tried to present eight common mistakes that a newbie often makes in this article. If you are thinking of starting a brand new WordPress website, you need to make sure that you are aware of all these errors. Avoiding these beginner mistakes would help you take a good start and be successful!

References!

Picture Credits: Dream Host

Content references: Search Engine Journal, Spiracle Themes