[NB] 16 Most Common Wordpress Mistakes to avoid!

i have been teaching how to build sites with wordpress for the last 10 years and therefore today i'm going to show you 16 most common wordpress mistakes lots of people do so if you were waiting for the lengthy introduction then you're wrong because i'm going to start right now and the first mistake i'm going to show you is that lots of people tend to choose wrong teams let's discuss about the teams for a moment for example there is a really popular team called avada with more than 710 000 sales how do the people usually buy the teams they tend to go to the team forest go to the wordpress now they browse new because they think that if i buy a team which is not used in lots of sites then it will somehow be different than others well you're wrong most of the teams nowadays are similar and if you buy a team from team forest then most like you will end up with a bad team or maybe even if the team is good for example this i've had a team it comes with a bunch of stuff you really don't need for example take a look these are other teams come with first slider second slider surge slider four slider fifth slider so why would you need the five different slider solutions on your site next issue with those themes is that they come with a built-in page builder for example this site uses team called enfault it has a built-in page builder the one you see right now but now let's imagine that i would like to switch teams and activate some other team okay let's do that i'm gonna go to the appearance teams let's activate proxy for a second now let's refresh a page and as you see it leaves behind total mess this is all the stuff it leaves behind and now if i would like to use my previous content i can't do that because there are a bunch of short codes i need to clean up probably it's easier for me to delete all the text and add it again because cleaning the shortcode mess is total bollocks next issue i have with all those teams is that they tend to use custom post types for example portfolio items so i'm gonna create a portfolio with this endfold team all looks great now i'm gonna go and switch teams once again i'm gonna go to the proxy activate it and as you see there is no portfolio items anymore everything is lost i have to create the custom post type by myself and hope that i can save it so i would suggest you to use lightweight awesome team for example bloxy is the one i'm using if you're interested then take a look at the description of this video there is a 10 coupon code for you nevertheless choose the right team and if possible stay away from the team forest teams now let's move to the second common mistake users do with a wordpress as you see i have a team called enfold activated but i have a bunch of other themes also installed so the second mistake is that users don't delete the themes they're not using so next time delete all other themes you have here that means you have less security risk less things to update and the less clutter in your server next mistake i see users do really often is that they are building their site in the staging area for example sub domain or so but if you go to the settings and reading discourage search engines from indexing this site is deactivated that means that google is indexing your site and your not yet ready-made site is visible for users so if you're building your site in a staging area then check this select box here and save changes and this one leads us to the next mistake users really often do that means if they move their site to the live server then they forget to uncheck this one which means that if your site is up and ready for visitors but you have discouraged search engines from indexing this site your site is not visible for search engines and you will not be discovered so don't forget to uncheck this one if you're moving your site to the live now let's move to the mistake number five let's go to the permalinks and the mistake users usually do is that they are using wrong url structure for example plain or they leave day and name in the permalinks don't use any of those just use the post name and keep your permalink short and don't forget to add the search phrase inside your permalink for example if i want to be discovered by the search phrase how to customize woocommerce checkout page then i'm going to add this search phrase into the url and since we already are talking about seo the next mistake is about seo and about obsessing the seo scores what i mean by that i'm gonna go to the pages i created the page called best wordpress themes i have installed a plugin called rankmat here and i added the text which is as you see two and a half thousand words long i optimized it for the search raised best wordpress themes and i got 100 percent now let's take a look at the text here it has random lorem ipsum dummy text which is so-called optimized for past wordpress themes search phrase now if i would put this text to live will i be in the first page of the google search no of course not because this is a random dummy text and although i got 100 i will not be even in the first 30 pages of the google because google knows that this text here is rubbish and it will not provide any useful information for the users so pay attention that all those indicators here are just for you to consider but don't be the one who's obsessing about those i'm going to show you a real life example so i'm gonna open up a private view and i'm gonna search for woocommerce percentage patch and as you see my own site w simple hacks as the first position for this search phrase but if you open up this site as you see the text on the site is not long and it contains one video and nothing else and better yet if i open this site up how to display a discount percentage on the sale badge rank match gives me 9 because i did not do anything here i even did not add the focus keyword inside here so nine percent and i'm in the first position in the google this one here has 100 percent and i'm sure it's not going to be anywhere because it's a dummy text here and once again don't obsess about these here those are just inter indicators and your helpers for example use a focus keyword in the meta description and in the url and so on and no tool is perfect if your content is rubbish and will not provide any help for the users then you will not get any results okay next mistake regarding the seo is that users replace their permalinks for example i'm gonna open up the permalink change it update it but since google already has indexed this site it's gonna cause trouble because if users are clicking on the search results they will be redirected to 404 site not found page therefore every time if you change the urls redirect the old url to the new url if you are using ranked math then under the dashboard there is a redirections activate this one here now go to the redirections add new and redirect all the url to the new url and don't forget to set it to 301 permanent move now let's move to the wordpress mistake number eight and that is users are not setting up the backups i'm using the wp vivid backup it's free and it's awesome it allows me to migrate my sites from one server to another it allows me to set up the schedules and if anything goes wrong i can restore my site so set up wp vivid updraft plus or any other backup plugin and schedule it to make the backups for you don't count on the backups made by your web hosting it's good that that they are doing that but just in case set it up for yourself enable schedule whether it's daily weekly monthly or whatever you would like to do and send your backups to the remote storage if possible for example dropbox google drive and so on next wordpress mistake users tend to do is that while building their sites there test different plugins for example different contact forms different sliders and so on but the mistake is that after testing and choosing the one they are going to choose they forget to deactivate the ones they are not using as you see i have first contact form a second and second one since i'm using only the fluent forms i'm gonna deactivate the contact form seven i have slider revolution here and i have layer slider but since i'm not using the slider revolution i'm going to deactivate that i have enfold team here which has a built-in page builder but since i have visual composer activated i'm going to deactivate it and now since i'm not going to use any of those here i'm going to delete all those from my server that means less security issues and less things to worry about so always deactivate the plugins you're not using choose plugins as you choose teams that means use will build plugins with a good reputation now let's move to the mistake number 10 and that is user tend to upload unoptimized images which are too big and that means slower site loading time for example as you see i have a bunch of images uploaded here and the sizes of those files are one and a half megabytes two megabytes three megabytes and so on that means all those images are approximately 10 times bigger than they should be those are the images i uploaded earlier what i tend to do is first i'm going to open up the image and see what is the image size 2000 pixels too much for me on the side i'm using i need only image with width of 1000 pixels so i'm gonna resize it now it's already 209 kilobytes next thing i do i'm gonna compress the images since i'm the mac user i'm using the app called image optim and this makes image load faster how does it work right click on the image services image optim and as you see it saved me 61 and now the image is 80 kilobyte if i open it up no quality loss here and i can upload it as i want i can even select bunch of images image optimize and as you see more than 50 basically for every image here if you are not mac users and go to tiny png site drag the image here and as you see from 200 kilobytes it is compressed to 45 kilobytes just download it and upload it maybe you're using some kind of plugin on your site which compresses images if you do that it's good but don't forget to resize the images usually you don't need images which are bigger than 1000 pixels on your site why because smaller screens are not able to show them in the full size so pay attention to that next mistake users often do is that they install a team then they install a demo content from the team they tweak it at their own content but the mistake they're doing is that they are not deleting the demo content for example i'm not using the portfolio on this site but demo content was imported if i'm not gonna delete this crap here it's gonna be indexed by google and since google sees that oh this site offers some kind of crappy content that means this site cannot be taken seriously and you don't want your site to be offering some crappy content do you so always delete demo content you're not using for example there are millions of sites in the search results that contains hello world which is a demo post wordpress ads with the installations always always delete the demo content and it's time to move to the mistake number 12 and that is that users are not using the security plugin whether it's word friends or sukuri or items whatever you like always use a security plugin hard on your site and use those plugins to help you and since we're already talking about security the mistake number 13 is that users are ignoring updates i have a site here which hasn't been updated for two or three months and if you're not keeping up with the wordpress news and you don't know that woocommerce 5.4.1 and earlier had a security breach which means you need to update it right now and if you don't do that then most likely you are opening your site for the hackers who just for the fun of it will hack your site and put some crappy content in it and that means your hosting will close your site and you're going to lose your customers so always update your plugins you don't have to do that every day or every week but at least once a month take a look at the site and update everything which is there to update and once again use your backup plugin to backup your site before you do that and after the successful updating and verifying that everything is working back up your site once again because next time if needed you can use it and see we are talking about the security let's move to the mistake number 14 and that is users are using really bad usernames and really weak passwords i know that it's really easy to go and make user names called demo or admin or user and now make a password which is password password1234 because it's easy to remember isn't it but if you do that then you open up your site to the hackers who will guess this within a couple of minutes so always use good usernames and strong password if the wordpress says that the password is weak or very weak then don't use it now let's move to the mistake number 15 and this is related to the favicon what is favicon take a look at here this is a favicon up here image optim has this one my site has this one here to add the fabric onto your site go to the appearance customize and somewhere under the site identity there is a select site icon add your own icon here and you're good to go so the mistake is that users are using the default icon or they are not using any icon to make it look better always add your own branding to the favicon so this mistake was the short one which means that we have only one mistake to cover and this one is a mistake number 16. that means that users are not using g-ship or leverage browser caching options for their site i have made a extra video regarding this topic so take a look at it the link to the video itself is in the description of this video so what will the leverage browser caching and gc do for you it will speed up your site and you can add the leverage browser caching or gzip without any plugin it's just copying and pasting a bit of code to the htaccess file how to do that i'm gonna show you in the video you see on a screen right now take a look at the description of this video if you do that it will speed up your site and that means better seo scores so these were the 16 most common wordpress mistakes i see really often i hope you're not doing any of those but if you do then now it's time to go and fix it let me know in the comments if you know any other common mistakes we should know about now before you go take a look at the next video you see on the screen right now because it's also full of useful content if you liked the video then press thumbs up if you're not already subscribed then subscribe otherwise take care

Channel: WP Simple Hacks - Wordpress tips and tricks

Views: 1,802

Keywords: most common wordpress mistakes, wordpress mistakes, wordpress mistakes to avoid, wordpress beginner mistakes, wordpress tutorials, gzip compression wordpress, gzip compression, leverage browser caching wordpress, leverage browser caching, wordpress for beginners, biggest wordpress mistakes, rank math seo, rank math tutorial, wordpress redirect, wordpress redirection plugin

Id: wJ_qvKXt44g

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 20 2021