Experience is always the best teacher, but you don’t have to learn from your own experience, here are Four Common Mistakes WordPress users make and how to avoid them or correct them.
1. Setting Up Your Permalinks
A New WordPress installation comes with the default URL structure: /?p=23 (e.g https://wpsyed.com/?p=123). This is a common mistake WordPress users make, It is very important to change this as it is bad for SEO and it doesn’t make navigation easy your readers.
Ensure you update your permalinks structure by going to Settings » Permalinks. I prefer using Post Name a it simplifies things.
2. Installing A WordPress Theme from a Bad Source
Not everyone can afford to buy a premium theme straightaway, so most times they just download themes from just anywhere. This obviously makes things cheaper for us, in the long run this can turn out to be disastrous as most of these themes have malicious codes injected to them.
Also read: 5 Best CDN For WordPress: Which one is right for you?
Avoid this common WordPress mistake, If you cannot afford a premium theme, there are ways you can get free premium WordPress themes for free.
You can Download Quality Free Themes From Any Of These Trusted Websites:
- WordPress.org
- Theme Hybrid
- Arras Theme
- Smashing Magazine
- Register for free at WooTheme, They give you access to all their free themes and plugins.
- Register for free at Themeforest, There is always a free file every month.
See Also: How To Check A WordPress Theme For Malicious Code
3. Not Creating a WordPress Backup
Backups are mostly needed when we don’t have them
It is important you don’t make this common WordPress mistake as it could be costly, get a plugin that would create automatic backups in WordPress, I don’t feel the need to explain the importance of a backup. BackWPup (free) is a good backup plugin.
4. No XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process. – Google
Google says it’s important is enough explanation for me, so I’m just going to give them one. Here are some plugins to help you generate XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
This is a must have plugin anyway. Select the sitemap option & enable sitemaps. Copy the location & submit to search engines.
WordPress SEO has the most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality in any WordPress plugin. Once you check the box, it automatically creates XML sitemaps and notifies Google & Bing of the sitemaps existence. These XML sitemaps include the images in your posts & pages too, so that your images may be found better in the search engines too.
Once you’ve avoided these common WordPress Mistakes you might want to install some good plugins on your WordPress site to get things running smoothly.
