Mistakes to Avoid as a WordPress Website Owner
If you’re reading this article, we are going to go ahead and assume you have a WordPress website.
There are several reasons why businesses turn to WordPress to power their online presence. At Pixel Jar, we’ve been working with WordPress for nearly two decades and believe it’s an excellent Content Management System.
But, as it’s grown and evolved over the last two decades, WordPress has become much more than the simple page builder it was known as in its earliest days. This means more options, customizability, and power – but each point means there’s more room to make small mistakes as a WordPress website owner.
Don’t worry. That’s what we’re here to help you avoid. In this article, we will share some best practices and common pitfalls to steer clear of as a WordPress website owner to ensure you have a site that works flawlessly and represents your company as it should.
Let’s dive into some of the most common mistakes to avoid as a WordPress website owner:
Skipping Updates
One of WordPress’ biggest strengths is that it’s constantly being updated. WordPress receives regular vulnerability and quality-of-life patches that add functionality while closing security holes. However, many WordPress website owners neglect to apply these updates.
Many might not be aware that the updates came out or think (erroneously) that the updates aren’t that important. But WordPress updates can affect performance, usability, design, and security.
With WordPress’ booming popularity, it’s a choice target for hackers. You might not think your business or website is big enough to be a target. But many hackers work in bulk, using web crawlers to find any site with “x vulnerability” to apply an attack.
So, have an update policy in place and stick to it. This should include your plugins, theme (if you’re using one), and, of course, your WordPress core.
Installing Too Many Plugins
We all love adding extra power to WordPress through plugins. Whether it’s AdSanity to help host ads on your WordPress website or any of the commonly installed WordPress plugins, plugins offer a nearly infinite amount of ways to add custom functionality to your website.
But because the WordPress community is vast and plugins can range from free to paid, there’s a wide range of development quality underneath the plugin. At best, these poorly coded plugins will simply slow your WordPress website down. At worst, they ruin your site’s experience or open a vulnerability for hackers to exploit.
To avoid this, try only installing and keeping the plugins your WordPress website needs. Uninstall all the rest.
Not Adding & Tracking Analytics
We live in an age of endless information and data. There’s no reason to guess how your website visitors behave anymore – simply dig into the data. But in a rush to get a website up and off the ground, many overlook setting up analytics trackers and knowing what metrics to track.
Google Analytics gives you insights into so many things. Unfortunately, many people stop at tracking how many people visit their site. Yes, it’s great to have many unique site visitors. But keeping tabs on which articles are read the most, your viewer’s ages, time spent on page, traffic sources, and more will help your WordPress website immeasurably.
Be sure to add any analytics you need early, but also ensure you continuously monitor them, ideally daily, but at least weekly. That way, you can spot any sudden surges in traffic, respond appropriately, and know who or what to attribute the surges to.
No Back Ups
Many have a surge of energy to create their new WordPress website. They know a sleek new website is just what they need to boost their business to the next level. But all that drive and vision goes towards creating the site, with little emphasis on the mechanisms that will keep the site humming along smoothly over the long term. Backups are vital to any website, and WordPress websites are no exception.
You might be playing with Plugins, and something breaks accidentally. Or a major WordPress update causes issues throughout your site, and you need to roll back to a previous version while you await a patch. Whatever the reason, you’ll be glad you have a reliable, hosted backup plan in place.
We recommend that you look to hosted WordPress backup plans that go above and beyond WordPress plugins that will back up your site to the same server. If something catastrophic happens, you’ll want a backup that sits on a different server from your regular one to ensure you have multiple layers of redundancy.
Unoptimized Media
These days, most cameras (and even phones) outshoot the resolution one would ever need for a website. While these large-resolution images are excellent for printing, they can detract from your website’s speed.
Many WordPress website owners will upload the highest quality images they can, thinking this will ensure the best-looking images on their sites. In reality, small image sizes can often look and perform better for your site.
Some themes might be doing this for you automatically. Still, it’s worth knowing the target device your audience will view your site on and optimizing accordingly. You can save a ton of storage, give a better user experience to visitors, and boost your search rankings.
Using a Cheap WordPress Host
Building a site with WordPress saves you money in so many ways. But that doesn’t mean you should use WordPress’ free hosting or the cheapest hosting you can find.
Take your time to review companies explicitly known for their WordPress website hosting. Then, dig into the details of what you need for your site – technical support, average page load times, backups, and security. Some WordPress hosts might appear cheaper upfront, but once you factor in the extra features and support you’re losing, you’ll wind up paying more.
Please pay attention to their commitment to uptime and read reviews on how they’ve handled other customers’ issues. Hopefully, your site will never experience a hack or outage. But they do happen. You don’t want what should be a quick interruption to give your business a bad reputation.
We’ve had fantastic results with WP Engine. They specialize in WordPress hosting and have industry-leading speed, security, and 24/7 live support. Not only will they ensure your WordPress website is speedy and secure, but they’ll also manage all the backend maintenance so you can focus on your business.
Testing or Updating Your Live Site
You’re just going in for a minor fix. What could go wrong? Sometimes a lot. That’s why it’s considered best practice to use a staging site separate from your main site to “test” on. Then, you push the changes through to the live site.
People have made mistakes while doing minor updates that have crashed their sites. We don’t want to scare you too much, only to encourage you to use a staging site to test things first. Plugins are available, but we recommend using a dedicated WordPress developer, like the previously mentioned WP Engine, if you’re unfamiliar with the process (or this tip is the first time you have heard about this practice).
Not Properly Monetizing Your WordPress Website
Many WordPress website owners aren’t correctly monetizing their sites. They have plenty of visitors, but maybe they lack knowledge of how to set things up properly. Others might be running ads on their website, but they might not be using ad placement best practices to get the most revenue out of their website.
Figuring out digital advertising best practices and learning how to set up ads can be difficult. But, a WordPress Plugin, like AdSanity, can help you easily insert self-hosted or network ads onto your WordPress site.
Getting Help
WordPress has experienced explosive growth and change over the years. With that development comes a host of opportunities and options to help elevate your website experience. But, as competition grows, it’s critical to avoid pitfalls and mistakes that can hold your website back.
If you’ve struggled with knowing what to do as a WordPress Website owner, please know that you can always offload anything you’re uncomfortable with or don’t have the time for anymore. At Pixel Jar, we’ve helped support some amazing companies – from small one-person sites to some pretty large ones. Let’s work together on your website!
Please note: Links to external companies may be affiliate links. If you use our links, we may earn a small commission.
