WordPress is now one of the top popular CMS web development platforms across the globe. In fact, as per a recent report by Gartner, 33.6% of the top-grossing websites across the industries are powered with WordPress. Furthermore, WordPress also controls about 60.5% of the worldwide CMS market share. These are quite impressive numbers to take WordPress CMS to the No.1 position in this category.
As WordPress is that popular, it is quite natural that it comes to your primary consideration of making a business website on CMS. Some of you may already be using WordPress as your enterprise web platform. When it comes to making and managing WordPress websites, there are a few mistakes people tend to make. However, with a little bit of baseline knowledge and some precautionary measures, you can avoid these mistakes, which can ultimately save a lot of time and money for you.
A few of these mistakes are unavoidable for a novice WordPress builder; however, you can bring down the adverse impact of these and the wastage of time by knowing the below points. Here, we are discussing some such blunders which WordPress users tend to make time and again. Whether you are a WordPress beginner or a pro who is using it for years, here are the tips to consider.
Top WordPress blunders to avoid
Paying extra
To get your website up and running, you need to have a domain name and hosting service as the primary requirements. It is noted that many website aspirants tend to fall into the trap of overpaying for such services by availing of all those features which they do not want by buying it as a bundle. The domain registration services always try to upsell all their additional services, but you need to be mindful of it.
If you are new to it, then there are possibilities that you may think that these add-ons will be required to you as they tend to pitch is convincingly for you. These add-ons include but are not limited to add-on email accounts, privacy measures, and some add-on security layers. Based on your situation, you may not need all those extra during the initial phases. So, you can save a lot on the upfront payment by deciding that you can start with the bare minimum domain and hosting package and then opt for add-ons later only when needed.
Try to choose the most appropriate WordPress plan based on your need. For this, you need to have a clear understanding of the short-term and long-term objectives of building a website. For example, if you are planning to do blogging with the portal, then there is no need to pay ten times the price to get all the features for an e-commerce portal plan as you don’t think of selling something down the road. Just make sure that you can easily and instantly upgrade the plan to incorporate more services as needed when you grow.
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Not taking back-up seriously
Any business that maintains a website and related database is a wrong mindset to think, “the worse won’t happen to me ever.” It is always possible that you wake on a fresh day morning to see that your website has been compromised, and all your hard-earned data had gone. You will face some major problems if that happens to you, bringing you back to square one.
As Flosum experts point out, this may happen if you do not properly backup your data. It is possible now to set automated backup of your data on WordPress, and if you have not done it ever, it is high time to start doing it now. On WordPress, the best way to do the backup is by using plugins. Check for WordPress backup plugins to make use of. For a cost-effective backup, you can use cloud storage services. If you do not have a remote storage location and leave everything on the hosting server, you may probably lose everything if the server crashes.
Not leveraging Google Analytics
It will be merely impossible to operate your website to its fullest potential unless you start analyzing the data. Many website owners still do not know where their traffic comes from, their current conversion rate, which content performs the best, and how do the people navigate on their website, etc. On the other hand, another set of website owners keep track of these metrics and leverage it to the best. The best way to gain insight into your website performance is through Google Analytics.
So, experts recommend the installation of a Google Analytics plugin on the WordPress website. It can give you insightful reports about your audience and their behavior. By keeping track of the stats for a while, you will identify your strong and weak areas and further improvise. All such behavioral data, like
shopping cart data, events, and conversion metrics, can be analyzed this way. Google Analytics has a very user-friendly interface, where you can get easy to understand data in chart and pictorial forms.
Ignoring the updates
When you manage your WordPress site through its dashboard, you may frequently be seeing the update notifications, but many tend to ignore these. However, in the digital world, technology and challenges are changes day by day, and dedicated service providers keep track of all these to provide their users with updates and patches from time to time.
So, once you come across such notifications, you must look into it carefully to identify the worthiness and significance of the same and install it if needed. Sometimes, the plugins and themes you use may have problems if you do not keep the WordPress version updated. So, it is best of your interest to always stay on top of these updates and patches whenever you see such notifications.
Selection of wrong themes
There are hundreds of thousands of themes, and it is quite possible that the WordPress developers may go wrong when they choose themes for their website. When you do not have any design experience or knowledge of the latest design trends, things may be tough for you to choose an appropriate theme. However, the theme you use, which dictates your website’s overall design, does have a huge impact on the performance and user acceptance of your website.
For example, if your website visitors struggle to find out what they look for or get confused with the navigation, your website has a poor user experience. Modern-day web users are so restless that if they do not find it user friendly, they instantly drop and move on to the next. So, it would help if you were careful about choosing themes on WordPress.
These are just a few basic things to notice while you are building a website on WordPress. If you know about these and take precautions beforehand, you can surely have a wonderful and successful website management experience on WordPress.
