Everyone makes mistakes though some mistakes are costlier than the others. When it comes to social media, mistakes are often costlier than most people believe and since even the most experienced of internet users make them, it is almost criminal not to learn from them. Here are the most common blunders that WordPress users make and how you can avoid them.
1. Giving the best plugins a miss
Familiarizing yourself with all the plugins that WordPress has to offer is definitely worth the time. However, giving plugins like All in One SEO Pack, Akismet, Contact Form 7 and Google XML Sitemaps a miss could be near fatal for your little research projects.
2. Not backing up your site
The world of technology is fraught with crashes and things going wrong. Loss of data is possibly one of the most painful effects of these technological failures. The best way to prevent all your WordPress data from disappearing is to use automatic backup plugin or simply to export your data to your hard drive.
3. Having an inhospitable permalink configuration
By default, WordPress defaults are not very search friendly. If you want optimize your WordPress pages for search engines, you would need to use keywords in your permalinks. You can do this by going to “options” then selecting “permalinks” from your “admin panel”. Then, you would need to get to the Custom Text box and enter keywords in a given format (/%category%/%postname%/%post_id”)
4. Relying on a single server
Using a single server makes it harder for visitors from around the world to load your page. This also strains your host/main web server since all requests get forwarded there. If you use a Non-WPWebHost, you would need to research Cloudflare or MaxCDN and have your content copied onto multiple mirror servers around the globe.
5. Not using an analytics programs
An analytics program keeps a tally of keywords that have lead people to your page and monitors traffic. This basically helps you create content for a target audience.
6. Not integrating your WordPress page Webmaster tools
Search engines often need a little prompting to get their crawlers to penetrate deeply into your page. For this to happen, you would need to use Google Webmaster tools and submit an XML sitemap to it to get all your pages indexed.
7. Not paying attention to Google Authorship Markup
To maximize exposure and increase credibility, you would need Google Authorship Markup. What this does is that it basically shows an image next to the meta description in results when a user searches.
8. Not using Globally Recognized Avatars
Globally Recognized Avatar or a Gravatar appears next to your name in a discussion forum or blog comment. Through a Gravatar, you get to create a unique global presence for yourself that would be instantly recognizable by your audience and lends credibility to your WordPress content.
9. Sticking with the Favicon generated by the theme
A favicon is the image displayed beside the page name in a list of bookmarks, next to the page title in a tab or in the browser’s address bar. Most people tend to stick to the favicon that comes with the theme though a unique one definitely adds more brand recall to your page. to create a custom favicon, you would need to search and generate a free favicon through a web search, create a 16×16 pixel file, navigate to the images segment in your theme settings and replace the existing default one with the custom favicon.
10. Not being mobile friendly
Making your mobile-user friendly is one of the basic commandments that you need to follow. Not having mobile optimized page can shrink your page views and visitors tally by much. To do this, you either need to install a WordPress theme that responds to smartphone and tablet interfaces or use a plugin like WPtouch that customizes your site for mobile devices.
11. Making FTP transfers through cPanel File Manager
FTP clients are known to improve the quality of blogs though it does take time to find one that suits you. Not using an FTP client or using the File Manager in the cPanel to do so makes it difficult to change file permissions on your server, download and upload files and you may even suffer from crashes and a slowed down interface.
12. Overloading your page with information
WordPress owners need to remember this simple golden rule-an over clogged page is a slow loading page and it distracts readers from your main content. Cramming your pages with excessive links, widgets, ads etc. might actually defeat the purpose of bringing in readers.