In life, as we try new things, we will always make mistakes. The same thing applies to WordPress. This article will help you avoid the most common mistakes beginners and even advanced users make.

You will be surprised on what you will learn. In addition, this list, will save you months of waisted time, cut down your costs and help you get to where you want to go much faster and with less stress and pain.

The most common error new bloggers make is selecting the incorrect blogging platform. In general, there are two flavors of WordPress. There is WordPress.com, which is a blog hosting provider, and WordPress.org, which is the well-known self-hosted WordPress platform which is the Platform you should go with.

You should begin with self-hosted WordPress.org because it comes per-installed with all the features you require; you have all the freedom to do as you please.

In addition, unlike WordPress.com it does not impose limitations on the use of plug-ins or your ability to monetize your site. Most importantly you own the content of your site and are free to migrate to any provider anytime you see fit.

Human attention spans are dwindling, and people crave immediate satisfaction. With faster internet connections, your users will perceive an additional few seconds of page load time as incredibly slow. As a matter of fact, most users will only give your site 3 seconds to load, if it fails to load within those 3 seconds they will jump to the next thing.

And it’s not only consumers who benefit; search engines also prioritize quicker websites in their rankings. By disregarding website speed and performance, you jeopardize both the user experience and search rankings.

That is why you must ensure that your website loads quickly. We’ve created a step-by-step guide that will assist you in optimizing the speed and efficiency of your WordPress site without delving too deeply into the technical details.

Among the things you will learn in our article:

Images are critical in creating an engaging website. They are, nevertheless, larger in file size than plain text. If you add images to your website without optimizing them, this will damage the loading speed of your website.

Among the best Plug-ins you can use for image optimization is Smush Pro

–Caching your WordPress site boosts performance dramatically and requires less server resources over time. This is beneficial for increasing your SEO rankings, as Google favors speedy websites. Additionally, your visitors like being delivered a lightning-fast website (which improves the user experience) while putting the least amount of stress on your server. This is particularly advantageous in shared hosting setups when server resources are pooled.

Choosing the proper design for their website is one of the most difficult issues that WordPress users confront.

With thousands of available WordPress themes, a typical newbie may experiment with several before settling on the correct one, which may require the user to rebuild their website multiple times.

To avoid this, we recommend starting with the correct WordPress theme and sticking with it.

This familiarizes your website visitors with your website, your brand, and its own style. Your design’s consistency and continuity have a significant impact on brand identification and awareness.

We are frequently asked by readers how to select a theme that performs flawlessly.

To be honest, we favor simplicity to glitz when it comes to design. It has worked extremely well for us, as well as for numerous other successful web businesses.

You must choose an attractive but basic WordPress theme that takes the following factors into account:

We recognize that as a non-technical user, you may be unable to check all of those items on your own. In that situation, we recommend that you purchase a theme from a reputable commercial WordPress theme shop. Please check out our article on the most beautiful and fastest loading themes that fulfill all the above requirements.

Ensure that only necessary plugins are activated and accessible on your live site. Delete any plugins that you installed for the purpose of testing or just to check out.

Even disabled plugins use server space and increase your hosting account’s file count. Try consolidated as many plugins as possible by selecting those that can offer multiple functionalities.

Plugins that are not in use but remain active on your installation may interfere with the functionality of your theme or another plugin that is critical to the success of your site.

Don’t install low quality Plugins that are not well known or well-reviewed by the WordPress Community.

With the Commercialization of WordPress, it is often difficult for both new and experienced WordPress users to understand and realize that they have purchased and enabled the same functionalities whether the service is offered by the hosting company or by different and competing Plugins.

Things such as Lazy Loading, Caching, GZip compression, Minification, Image optimization etc. can have detrimental effects on both the speed and functionality of your website when you have two instances of the

It is not recommended to experiment with new themes, plugins, or significant setting changes while your site is online. For instance, if you’ve just learned about a fantastic plugin and can’t wait to test it, avoid doing so on a live site. Such alterations may have a detrimental effect on your site and may result in catastrophic consequences.

Staging environments also serve another purpose, they allow you to work and update your website without posting partial posts. It is highly unprofessional for visitors to see your website with incomplete information or partial content. As your site grows and has more visitors, having a staging environment is non-negotiable.

One should never underestimate data loss, each year both big and small websites are victims of theft, hacking, accidents, or data corruption.

Your remedy to all these threats is automated backups. Without a backup, you could lose all your WordPress data, and it would be very difficult if not impossible to recover your data.

While most well-known hosting service providers offer free backups, the issue is that they keep your live site and backups on the same server. If the server becomes unavailable for any reason, the backup will be lost along with the live site. As a result, it is recommended that you save your backups on a frequent basis in multiple locations that are conveniently accessible.

 Setting up backups is straightforward and not a complex thing to do. There are excellent backup plugins such as UpdraftPlus that will automatically create backups for you on cloud storage service like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.

Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights about how people find and use your site. Site Kit is the one-stop solution to deploy, manage, and get insights from critical Google tools to make the site successful on the web. It provides authoritative, up-to-date insights from multiple Google products directly on the WordPress dashboard for easy access, all for free.

Bringing the best of Google tools to WordPress

Site Kit includes powerful features that make using these Google products seamless and flexible:

Easy-to-understand stats directly on your WordPress dashboard Official stats from multiple Google tools, all in one dashboard Quick setup for multiple Google tools without having to edit the source code of your site Metrics for your entire site and for individual posts. Easy-to-manage, granular permissions across WordPress and different Google products Supported Google tools

Site Kit shows key metrics and insights from different Google products:

Search Console: Understand how Google Search discovers and displays your pages in Google Search. Track how many people saw your site in Search results, and what query they used to search for your site.

Analytics: Explore how users navigate your site and track goals you’ve set up for your users to complete.

AdSense: Keep track of how much your site is earning you.

PageSpeed Insights: See how your pages perform compared to other real-world sites. Improve performance with actionable tips from PageSpeed Insights.

Tag Manager: Use Site Kit to easily set up Tag Manager- no code editing required. Then, manage your tags in Tag Manager.

Optimize: Use Site Kit to easily set up Optimize- no code editing required. Then, set up A/B tests in Optimize.

When it comes to promoting their websites, many WordPress users make educated predictions. Some people entirely disregard SEO, while others approach it half-heatedly.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) improves your website’s ranking in search engines, allowing more users to find it.

The majority of websites receive the majority of their traffic from search engines. SEO is critical to your online business’s success.

For SEO Optimization the best Plug-In to use is the Yoast Plugin.

Beginners frequently underestimate the value of maintaining up-to-date plugins, themes, and WordPress installations. Install the latest plugins, theme, and WordPress installation; maintaining your site’s resources is just as critical as constructing it. This is necessary not just for the efficient operation of your site, but also to prevent it from being hacked. An out-of-date WordPress version is more vulnerable to hacker attacks, eroding all your hard work on your site.

One of the most important things you need to know about updates that most often they contain security updates to fix vulnerabilities. The information becomes in the public domain and hackers immediately go to work exploiting those vulnerabilities, hoping to land on a site that is not updated.

By default, WordPress generates a page’s or post’s URL as http://www.yoursitename.com/?p=Post ID>. This is the permanent URL for the post, but it can be replaced with a more user-friendly URL that includes descriptive text, such as http://www.yoursitename.com/contact-us/.

Beginners frequently fail to adjust this option to the proper format, which makes URLs more difficult to remember. Under “Settings > Permalinks,” you can configure your site’s permanent link structure. Learn more about how to configure permalinks on a WordPress site.

Hackers are primarily interested in gaining access to your website via guessing the password. Beginners frequently use the same password as the site’s name, which simplifies the job of hackers. Assure that your database, FTP account, and site login all use strong passwords. In any event, avoid using the username “admin” while logging into the admin panel.

Simply disable the option “Anyone Can Register” under “Settings > General” to remove the new user registration button from the login screen. This prevents anonymous individuals from registering for your site without your permission. Additionally, you can utilize plugins to prevent an IP from logging in after several failed tries.

Disable New User Registration in WordPress Additionally, verify that new users are assigned proper roles to avoid someone gaining admin access and deleting or modifying content.

Many users fail to erase the default demo material that comes with a fresh WordPress installation. This includes a sample page, a ‘Hello World’ blog post, and a default comment.

By not eliminating this content, search engines are able to crawl and index it. Now, if you search Google for the text in the demo content, you’ll come across hundreds of thousands of results. That is duplicate content, which search engines consider to be low-quality pages.

Similarly, many individuals leave the default WordPress tag line, which reads ‘Just another WordPress site’, unmodified.

You should remove the default material and the tag line, as they appear unprofessional and generate a negative first impression.

Comment spam is obnoxious and can reflect poorly on your brand. Many beginners configure their blogs in such a way that all new comments are instantly published without moderation.

This implies that without your knowledge, spam comments with links to malware and low-quality websites can go live on your website. This could have a detrimental effect on your search engine rankings and the reputation of your website.

You must always enable comment moderation on all of your WordPress blogs. Simply navigate to the Settings » Discussion page and choose the checkbox next to the option ‘A comment must be manually authorized.’

Following that, you should make it a habit to review and approve comments on your website. Additional information is available in our article on how to handle comment spam in WordPress. .

Many individuals us a personal Gmail or yahoo email accounts, as contact information on their website.

Now, how do we know for certain that they are representing that company or website in an official capacity?

Similarly, if you own a firm and continue to send work emails from a free email account, people will find it difficult to take you seriously.

Individuals lack the time and expertise to verify that you are the legitimate proprietor of that website or business.

Did you know that more than a majority of visitors to your website will never return?

If you’re not growing your email list, you’re effectively losing money with each website visitor who quits. Converting website visitors to email subscribers enables you to re-engage with those users.

To create your email list, you’ll need to use an email marketing solution. We recommend Constant Contact since they are one of the greatest email marketing businesses on the market and their platform is extremely user-friendly.

Another easily avoidable error that many newcomers make is failing to put up a contact form. Without a contact form, visitors to your website will be unable to reach you, which can result in major missed opportunities.

Almost every major website includes a contact page. It is one of the most critical pages that each website should have.

Although WordPress does not provide a built-in contact form, there are numerous excellent WordPress contact form plugins available.

We propose utilizing WPForms Lite, a free version of the popular WPForms plugin, which is currently utilized by over 2 million websites.

Our complete instructions on how to establish a contact form in WordPress are available here.

Occasionally, inexperienced WordPress users develop critical website pages using posts. Similarly, some users create pages for articles when they should be creating posts.

After a while, many consumers discover their error when their website becomes tough to operate.

In general, pages are used for static pages that do not update frequently, such as about, contact, and privacy policy.

On the other hand, posts are used for information that changes over time, such as news, updates, articles, and blogs.

Consider our comprehensive guide to the differences between posts and pages and what you can do with each.

Misuse of fonts are interpreted by visitors as amateurish, Your site and content will not be taken seriously. Certain newbie WordPress websites and blogs include colorful fonts. Additionally, some pages feature a variety of font styles and sizes.

As a result, a bad font presentation might increase bounce rates by undermining the visitor’s belief in the authenticity of your information.

As the Saying Goes, Failing to plan is planning to fail. This is especially True to your WordPress strategy.

As any project one undertakes in life, you should carefully plan. The time and energy you put into researching your strategy will  assist you in determining the message you wish to convey via your platform. Additionally, planning ahead will save you the headache of deciding on which themes or plugins to use and then changing your mind mid-stream.