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Top 7 Newbie Mistakes That Everyone Makes in WordPress

WordPress is by far the easiest way to launch a website and put your content creation ideas into practice. This is the main reason why WordPress quickly became the largest content management system in the world, powering more than 30% of all sites.

But the fact that it’s easy to use this platform doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make a mistake. On the contrary, beginner-level webmasters often make simple mistakes that can ruin months of hard work.

If you’ve recently launched your own site, you need to understand and avoid the most common blunders. Keep reading to learn the top seven newbie mistakes that everyone makes in WordPress.

The Pros of Using WordPress

Before you learn the major WordPress mistakes, we want to remind you of the pros of using this content management system. Our fellow colleagues at Essays On Time helped us make the list of its fundamental qualities:

• User friendliness: You can install a WordPress-powered site within minutes, even if you are a complete amateur.

• Flexibility: Although it was designed primarily for simple websites and administrators with little to no experience, WordPress kept growing and adding new features. Today, the platform is so flexible and all-encompassing that you can use it to build even the most complex sites with tons of interactive elements.

• Various themes: WordPress themes are versatile and offer you the chance to play with different styles, designs, and functions.

• Support: As an open-source platform, WordPress attracts contributors from all over the globe who are eager to help you in case you need to solve problems or simply want to ask a system-related question.

Common WordPress Blunders You Need to Avoid

WordPress beginners make a lot of mistakes, but we want to focus only on the most common errors in this field. Honorable mentions include weak passwords, irregular backups, and broken links, but here are the seven biggest WordPress blunders:

1. Choose the wrong platform

WordPress comes in two different versions with different domain extensions: com and org. This seems to be very confusing for the vast majority of users, so they end up choosing the wrong platform. What is the difference between these two platforms?

WordPress.com is a free platform with all of the basic features that suit the requirements of blogging sites. But if you count on business growth and hope to expand portfolio, you might want to consider WordPress.org. For instance, HR software companies use the org version because it’s a self-hosted platform with enough features to satisfy the needs of the most demanding webmasters.

2. Use an unresponsive theme

More than 50% of online traffic is generated through mobile devices. What does it mean? It means you have to use a responsive WordPress theme in order to ensure flawless user experience. However, some webmasters neglect this issue and use an unresponsive theme. It’s a huge mistake because Google penalizes unresponsive websites, but the good thing is that most themes now take care of mobile responsiveness automatically.

3. Installing too many plugins

Users love WordPress because it offers more than 50 thousand plugins. While this is a huge advantage of the platform, it also comes as a setback in case you install too many plugins. Each tool improves website functionality, but it also reduces the speed. And when you combine a lot of plugins simultaneously, rest assured it will slow down your website and jeopardize security. To eliminate this issue, make sure to delete unnecessary and inactive plugins.

4. Keep a default permalink structure

When you create a new page, it comes with a default permalink structure that represents the digital address of your page. If you are a WordPress beginner, you will leave it like that and stop paying attention to permalinks, but it would be a big mistake.

First of all, a random set of characters doesn’t look good. Secondly, it diminishes your search engine optimization efforts because tailored permalinks enable engine crawlers to identify your content a lot faster. The solution is easy: customize URLs manually whenever you make a new webpage.

5. Complex structure

Building a complex website with too many tags and categories is yet another frequently seen WordPress blunder. Such a practice completely ruins user experience because it makes website navigation complicated and counterintuitive. Therefore, your goal is to design a simple website structure with only a few basic categories followed by a few sub-categories. That way, users won’t have a problem finding the content they are looking for.

6. Forget to add a contact form

One of the main purposes of a website is to drive user engagement, but how can you achieve this goal if you don’t add a contact form to your site? Some webmasters only leave an email address, thus ending up with thousands of spam messages every month. You can solve the problem within seconds by installing a contact form plugin.

Professional organizations such as Essay On Time take a step forward by introducing chatbots, a state of the art engagement technology that makes businesses available 24/7. This may be too much for beginner-level websites, but you should keep this option in mind in case you notice website traffic booming.

7. Not using Google Analytics

WordPress comes with a native analytics package, but it’s not enough to give you serious insights into website functioning. Responsible site administrators always use Google Analytics because it represents the cornerstone of business intelligence. Using this tool, you can learn pretty much everything about your website: from traffic and user activities to campaign measurement and flow visualization. Of course, you can also create custom reports according to your own requirements.

Conclusion

WordPress is one of the simplest and most intuitive content management systems, but only if you learn how to use it properly. Unfortunately, too many webmasters make beginner mistakes and jeopardize the potential of their sites. We showed you top seven newbie blunders to avoid in WordPress – make sure to remember them and turn your website into a genuine success story!