Mistakes often happen inevitably, even if you are professional in managing WordPress. Nowadays, as WordPress prevails around the world, millions of people are using it to build their own blogs and websites, among whom a large percentage of people actually have little specific knowledge on the management of their WordPress sites, which means that numerous people are making mistakes every day, especially for beginners lack of basic knowledge.
The mistakes may cause a disorder to your WordPress site or even result in slowness or inaccesibility. Below are the 10 common WordPress mistakes that people are most likely to make. We hope that this list can help arouse your awareness in these aspects and prevent your WordPress site from suffering these mistakes.
1. Use "admin" as username
When creating a blog or website with WordPress, "admin" is always set as the username by default, and moreover, this username is automatically assigned to an administrator level. Some people choose to keep using it maybe because it is easy-to-remember.
Actually, this deed puts your WordPress site at risk of being easily attacked because "admin" is the easiest username to predict. If you've already used it, you should change the username as soon as possible. Don't know how to do that? Please check this article.
2. Use a weak password
Using a weak password is also risky, especially when you are using the default "admin" as username. Imagine that you have a password like "password", your name, or "1234567" (only some consecutive numbers), which is fully predictable, how difficult it will be for attackers to hack into your WordPress site? So, as a suggestion, you'd better create a strong password which contains letters, numbers, as well as symbols, and also, update the password regularly.
3. Ignore WordPress and plugin Updates
WordPress is consistently releasing new updates which work to perfect the software by fixing bugs as well as extending the features. If you ignore the updates, your site is more likely to be opened to security issues. And when a security vulnerability of the old release is used as attackers' entry to your site, it will cost you a fairly long time and much effort to fix it up. The problem could also happen to plugins.
Therefore, to keep your WordPress site safe, remember to upgrade WordPress and the plugins on your site as soon as new upgrades come out.
4. Forget to install a caching plugin
Do you know why your WordPress site is slow? Have you take some measures to prevent the slowness from happening? If you are a beginner, it's time to install a caching plugin to enable cache on your site. As WordPress is a dynamic database driven CMS, any views on your site make requests to the database, and when the database takes a long time to deal with a large number of requests, you site becomes slow.
Caching, however, helps speed up your site by loading the saved static contents locally. There are dozens of caching plugins available, among which W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache are proven to be the best. Of course, some other problems can also cause slowness and downtime. If you want to speed up your site, this article may help you.
5. Not create a backup
Not a single web host is so confident as to guarantee there will never be any attacks occurring to its servers. It is right that most web hosts nowadays do the backup regularly, but you should know that the backup doesn't include the latest changes on your site. To make sure that your site can well recover from destructions, you'd better create a backup by yourself.
Our advice is to make use a backup tool offered by your host to create automatic backups in WordPress. If you cannot get a tool from your host, there are some other good solutions, such as VaultPress (paid) and BackWPup (free).
6. Have too many categories
The way a website is organized has a notable impact on not only the SEO optimization, but also the load times. Too many categories make search engines confused, and at the same time, slow down your site. For this problem, you can use a great feature of WordPress – tags – to categorize your posts based on keywords.
7. Use the default favicon
A favicon is an icon displayed next to your page title in the browser window. Most beginners don't pay attention to this feature, so their sites are often coming with favicons from their web hosts or the themes they use. However, if you want to be more professional, you need a custom favicon to be part of your identity.
It is easy to add a favicon. There are free favicon generators on the Internet, so try to find one, create a 16 pixels x 16 pixels file, go to the theme's images section, and then replace the default favicon with the new one. Now you have your own design on your site.
8. Forget to set up a friendly permalink structure
By default, WordPress set "/?p=123" as the permalink. This URL structure is unfriendly to both search engines and your visitors because when they see an URL like this, they have no idea what the page is about – search engines don't know, and neither do your visitors.
To make the permalinks more SEO friendly and easier to understand for your visitors, you should log into WordPress dashboard, and find "Permalinks" in the "Settings" section. There are 6 common settings available for your to choose.
9. Use a wrong WordPress theme
When choosing a theme, several things should be taken into consideration – the ease of use, the reputation of the theme provider and the way the theme is coded. If you utilize a wrong theme from a bad source, you are likely to be bothered by numerous errors or malicious links.
For free themes, our advice is only downloading themes from WordPress.org; and for premium WordPress themes, purchase one from a trusted marketplace.
10. Go with an unreliable web host
This problem is not about the management of WordPress itself, but the environment in which it runs. The quality of the web hosting service has direct and significant influences on the reliability of your WordPress site. If your site is hosted with an unreliable web host, it will definitely suffer from frequent slowness and downtime. A good web host, however, helps you keep your visitors stay.
Don't know how to pick a web host for WordPress? All right, just read this tutorial on this issue. If you still have no idea, we have the following recommendations.
Rank
Company
Highlights
Price
1
HostGator
Unlimited disk space, bandwidth, email & FTP accounts
99.9% uptime guarantee & instant backups
Shared SSL certificate & $100 Google AdWords credits
$3.96/mo
Visit
2
Arvixe
1 free domain name & 6 hosted domains
Daily R1Soft backups & CloudFlare CDN
No hidden fees & 60 days money back guarantee
$4.0/mo
Visit
3
JustHost
1 free domain name & free instant setup
cPanel control panel & SimpleScripts 1-click WordPress installer
99.9% uptime & anytime money back guarantee
$2.95/mo
Visit