WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world. Just like Facebook has beaten any possible competition, WordPress rules the website development area.
Running a WordPress site doesn’t look like a big deal at first. Since you can find tons of online educational resources on the topic, it’s really safe to assume that everything will work perfectly. And yet, once you start working with it, you suddenly realize that you’ve totally underestimated it.
Simply put, WordPress gives you infinite possibilities and choices. When diversity is abundant, the main problems tend to sound like this:
- Did I make the right choice?
- Did I choose the right theme?
- Are those plugins affecting the quality of my website?
- Did I optimize my site’s speed properly?
- Are users able to understand my message and intention?
- Am I on the right track?
- Am I making significant mistakes?
Too much diversity can often bring chaos in a webmaster’s mind. That was my case. A young, ambitious, and ferocious wanna-be entrepreneur who thought that nothing can wrong and that all mistakes can be fixed.
I thought that starting an online business is a piece of cake, mainly due to my theoretical understanding of the WordPress platform (yes, I studied a lot before actually buying that domain and hosting).
Of course, I was dead wrong.
It took me over six months to be able to detect, analyze, and fix about 90% of the mistakes I’ve made during the initial stages of my website’s development. What about the 10%? Well, 10% was my wise and safe assumption that there will always be things to fix, problems to solve, and aspects to optimize.
I am writing this post because I decided to make my mistakes matter. If I share them with you, you’ll not only save significant amounts of time and money, but you’ll also avoid a lot of stress, setbacks, and struggles. Today’s article is addressed to marketers, entrepreneurs, and online webmasters who feel that “something” is not working right and that mistakes need to be fixed.
Without further ado, let’s have a look at the most common, annoying, and often critical WordPress mistakes that are sabotaging your website’s performance and traffic. Pay attention, take some quick notes, and make sure you treat this process with patience and consistency!
Technical Mistakes
Technical mistakes are constantly damaging your website’s performance without you even noticing it. Here’s what you may do wrong:
You Neglect Regular Backups
WordPress backups are lifesavers in case anything goes wrong. As a webmaster, you’ll be making changes every single day. Adding new content, plugins, modifying your theme, and so on. Every decision you make might cost you time, money, and traffic.
For example:
- A hacker (hired by a competitor) might steal your credentials and destroy your site.
- Conflicts may arise between plugins, and your site might stop loading.
- A small modification in your WordPress theme can cause major issues to your site.
The solution? International SEO advises schedule and secure backups. First of all, make sure you create a backup before any important change, then store that backup on an external drive to ensure that nothing can go wrong. There are countless WordPress backup plugins like VaultPress or BackupBuddy who will take care of this problem without you having to worry about it.
You Chose a Cheap Hosting
Cheap hosting can decrease your website’s performance in various ways. You get what you give, so if you go for a £5 shared hosting plan, your website’s speed will often cause trouble.
If you’re planning to acquire organic traffic by optimizing your site for the search engines (SEO), you should be aware that Google and the rest of the search engines care a lot about website speed.
Secondly, your users will not appreciate slow-loading pages, so they’ll often “bounce” off your website. Thirdly, shared hosting packages are often making you vulnerable to DDoS attacks that can put your site down for undefined periods of time. The solution? Don’t be afraid to invest in a VPS or a managed WordPress hosting plan.
You Got Too Many Plugins
Plugins are helpful as they help you automate various manual tasks. They save time and often money, though they can often represent a huge technical problem.
Three things can happen:
- One of the plugins you install can be in conflict with your theme
- One of the plugins you install can be in conflict with another plugin (or more)
- You may install a bugged plugin that will cause issues such as unwanted theme modifications
The solution is to always go for reputable plugins, deactivate the ones you no longer need, check for plugin compatibility with your WP theme, perform backups before you install any plugins, and try to keep them to a minimum.
You are Not Optimizing Your Images
Optimizing images before you upload is absolutely necessary in case you want a fast-loading website. As I’ve mentioned above, your website speed matters for both your users and for your search engine rankings.
To optimize your images, you can leverage various image compression plugins that will instantly do the job for you.
You Create Posts instead of Pages
Many new webmasters don’t understand the difference between posts and pages. If you use posts instead of images and vice-versa, you’ll eventually realize that your site is extremely hard to manage.
“About us”, “Privacy Policy”, “Contact” – these should always be pages because they are static and you rarely modify them.
When you publish new articles, news, and updates, you want to create posts.
You Haven’t Installed Google Analytics
According to international marketing strategy, Google Analytics is the most important plugin you can ever install on your WordPress website. If you’re not familiar with it yet, Google Analytics helps you understand your traffic and your user’s behavior. It shows you where people spend more time on your website, it tracks conversions, sales, and so on. If you want to become a serious WordPress webmaster, you must definitely start using Google Analytics!
Content & Marketing Mistakes
Content is important for both your readers and the search engines. If you want a blooming WordPress experience, make sure you identify and fix the following mistakes:
You Have a Vague Idea About Your Readers
How well do you know your target audience?
Before you plan to write any type of content (including web content), you need to understand who you’re writing for. At the time I was creating my first website, Assignmentgeek, I knew nothing about target audiences. Therefore, my content wasn’t really meaningful so nobody would trust my paper reviews.
After defining more than one target personas (ideal customers), I’ve started crafting content that really resonated with my future buyers. The changes were significant: more traffic, more time spent on the website, and obviously more sales.
Before you create content, make sure you know who you’re creating it for!
You’re Obsessed with SEO Content Rules
SEO is important because it represents a stable and organic source of traffic. However, many webmasters tend to forget that they’re writing for people, not for robots.
Right now, Google’s algorithm prioritizes natural content and rejects the over-optimized one. This means you shouldn’t obsess about what keywords you add and how many times you add them. You should use semantic keywords in a natural way and stop worrying so much about rankings. Provide as much value as you can and you’ll naturally grow in search rankings over time.
You Create Average Content
There’s no reason to write something that has been written 1000 times before. Nowadays, there are millions of blogs and the content marketing competition is really high.
You need to differentiate yourself and your brand by creating out-of-the-box content. It doesn’t have to be original because that is often impossible. Everything has been written before.
You must do your best to stand out from the crowd and be unique. If you see your competitors writing about the same thing over and over again, take those topics, twist them, and add new angles. Use the Skyscraper technique to do that!
You Write Average Titles
Your titles make the entire difference!
Very few people will end up reading your actual content if you don’t give your best when creating titles for your posts. Here’s what I mean:
“Top ways to improve your site” vs “25 Insightful Techniques to Skyrocket Your Site’s Traffic”
What would you click?
You Write Blocks of Text
Take a look at this article. Do you see any blocks of text? You don’t, because if there were any, you wouldn’t have reached this subheading.
Blocks of text are extremely hard to digest, and many people won’t even bother trying. Writing short and easy-to-read sentences is a great way to improve your users’ experience!
Marketing Mistakes
Marketing mistakes can cost a lot of time and money, especially because everything you optimize (website and content) is done in order to acquire traffic. Well, to ensure that your website is actually frequented by your target audience, you must pay attention to the following mistakes:
You Don’t Have an Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing is popular and very commonly used for a simple reason: it works.
When you promote your WordPress site on social media, you’re creating the initial rapport. When users enter your website, you’re making the first impression and starting your actual relationship with a person.
If you manage to convince your traffic to become your email subscribers, you will be able to nurture and strengthen your relationship with each of the persons who are interested in what you have to offer. You don’t make sales on your website – you do it through email!
You Are Not Constantly Tracking and Optimizing Your Site’s Performance
Some webmasters (I hope that’s not you) don’t understand the importance of data analytics. When you run a website for business purposes, you need to go for specific goals.
You cannot know when you’re reaching those goals unless you’re tracking the number of visitors, the conversions to your email list, but also the sales conversions. Of course, these are just three of the things you can track, but there are countless more KPIs (key performance indicators) that you can follow. It all depends on your purpose, goals, and needs!
You’re Too Focused on Selling Rather than Providing Value
As an assignment helper that constantly provided value for money, I have quickly learned a very important lesson.
When someone enters your website, the last thing they want to see or hear is your product promotion. When people read content, they are seeking the benefits of that content, and they often expect it for free.
One of the biggest mistakes you can do is to intrusively try to sell your products and services without developing a relationship with your prospects. Use your WordPress site to create the initial bridge between you and those random prospects, and leverage email marketing to take the relationship to the next level. When you believe that you’ve gained their trust, you’re free to promote anything you want!
Takeaways
Whether you’re running your WordPress site for monetization, non-profit, or hobby purposes, you should constantly identify, assess, and optimize your moves.
Keep something in mind though – mistakes are inevitable. They are also often subjective, so whether you see them or not that is all up to you. In my opinion, the most important thing you need to establish is the priorities and goals of your website.
If you want sales, then start looking for mistakes that decrease your chances of converting prospects into customers. If you want to educate and inspire, pay attention to your content and your website’s UX. If you want to have fun while blogging, pay attention to your expectations. Either way – don’t stop improving!
Get in touch today and find out how we can help.
