WordPress is one of a few wonderful tools that are available to consumers without the requisite skills to build a website from scratch. Squarespace, Wix and WordPress, are leaders in the world of consumer website building, with WordPress offering the most hands-on possibilities out of the three. Because of the higher number of customization options, WordPress is not only looked to by non-experts but also by trained web designers, who appreciate its layout, simplicity and range of options as reasons to use it over a custom site builder console. However, this added layer of complexity (when compared to something like Squarespace) is also where you can run into some problems along the way as a newer user. Beginners may find some elements to it a bit confusing. So, let’s look at some easy mistakes and how to avoid them.
WordPress Mistakes
.org VS .com
There are two WordPress sites and it’s very easy to get them confused an find yourself in the wrong place if you aren’t careful. WordPress.com is a simple blog hosting service that offers limited support and very few options. It’s still good, especially if what you are really looking for is just a simple blog format, but it’s likely not what you are looking for. WordPress.org is a famous platform that gives you all of the many features you want straight away. It’s self-hosting so you buy your own domain and install WordPress into the domain, which will feel unusual but is actually a great way to go about your site-building.
No Backing Up Your Work
In general, in website building through some sort of commercial platform, the service itself will have a system for automatically saving your work within their console. This is effective and easy and makes revisions quick and simple. However, it may not be enough. “Though most of these autosaving tools are pretty strong most of the time, it’s senseless to risk losing your work through negligence. I always back up my site content”, advises Mark Bouchier, content manager at BritStudent and WriteMyx. It’s always unbelievably painful to lose things, so make sure you’re protected.
Failing With SEO
SEO (or, Search Engine Optimization) is something of a key phrase in modern business and website construction and it’s as important for the beginner on their own as it is for the giant company stuffed with resources. “SEO is all about doing the right things to try and ensure that your website gets the respect and attention of its search engine.
So, if you want Google to rank your page highly and to consider it a valuable place to direct web and search users towards, you need to play by there rules”, explains Felix Lamper, tech writer at Australia2Write and NextCoursework. You can develop a WordPress site that you think looks really nice and cleverly designed, but poorly optimized graphics, too many or too few keywords, too little copy, in general, are all things that could leave you ranking very low indeed, something which will be a real pain to have to deal with later on. Get it right, consider SEO from the off with WordPress.
Not Choosing The Right Theme
So many WordPress themes look so incredible straight away that it can be easy to make the mistake of jumping on the first one that really catches your attention. The difficulty is that themes are throughout the site, so there may be things you hadn’t considered from the start that come back to bite you. What can then happen is that WordPress users keep needing to build and re-build their websites over and over again ad infinitum, which is really tedious. But, if you take time and care over your initial choice, browsing through all the available options then you should be able to find the one that best suits your site from top to bottom.
Conclusion
Overall, WordPress is wonderful. It’s excellent for beginners and very useful for pros, with so much flexibility in the service it offers. However, its relatively higher level of complexity can leave some beginners not knowing what’s going on. Hopefully, this list of tips will help ensure that that beginner isn’t you.
