9 Mistakes To Avoid When Building Your WordPress Websites

While it’s true that everyone makes mistakes, it doesn’t hurt that you get it right the first time.

As one of the most popular CMS platforms today, there’s a high chance that you’re not the first one to make mistakes. You can learn from the mistakes of others, the lessons they’ve learned, and the problems they had to solve.

This post will walk you through some of the most common WordPress design mistakes. This lets you avoid them to help you create a highly functional WordPress site.

1. Using poorly-coded themes

One of the first decisions you’ll ever make when creating a WordPress site is a theme. Ideally, you need to pick one that is visually appealing and reflects your brand well.

However, it’s also vital that you pick a theme that’s both functional and easy to use. While many themes may initially look attractive, they might be poorly coded and significantly slows down your site’s loading times. Thus, you must invest in a high-quality theme whose developer regularly updates.

2. Not Using a Mobile Responsive Design

With the increased use of mobile devices, you must ensure your WordPress site is mobile-friendly. Ideally, it should be easily read and even navigate on smaller screens. It should also be easily adjusted on various screen sizes and resolutions.

4. Ignoring SEO

Search engines significantly contribute to your site’s Organic Traffic. Optimizing your site using the best SEO practices is key to success. From attracting new visitors to your site to expanding your reach, SEO gives you that competitive edge, making you stand out from the rest of the pack.

You can start with the basics, such as competitive keyword research, creating powerful backlinks, and optimizing on-page elements in your site, like meta descriptions, URLs, and title tags. For more advanced features, you can install the Yoast SEO plug-in.

5. Installing too many plug-ins

Although the right WordPress plug-in could make your site more appealing and improve its SEO value, an excess of these plug-ins also slows down your site, leading to a poor user experience.

Make sure that you install plug-ins with the exact purpose. For instance, will it add a contact form to your site to enhance engagement and site security? If not, then consider passing it up for something more useful instead.

6. Skipping WordPress updates

WordPress will usually send regular platform updates to fix any security issues and bugs in your site. You need to update them to ensure your site is protected from issues that a particular update should fix.

This can lead to severe consequences on your part, like stealing of sensitive data, site crashes, and loss of data. Moreover, your plug-ins and themes need to updated as well as these updates will ensure that your site can keep up with the latest features, security patches, and bug fixes.

7. Ignoring website speed and performance

With so many sites serving various purposes, this is one of the essential aspects you must focus on. Users might only want to visit your site if it takes a short time to load your pages.

Not only with users, but even search engines will rank your site better if it has quicker loading times. Thus, you need to pay attention to site speed and performance for an excellent user experience and for your site to rank better on search engines.

8. Not optimizing media

Most of us carry exceptional cameras in our pockets nowadays, making it easy to upload new photos to our WordPress site. However, this also leads to a common and significant mistake.

By taking a photo using your Android or iPhone device, the image will be significantly bigger than it needs to be on your site. These big, high-resolution images are excellent for printing or even cropping a smaller section that could be shown at a bigger size without losing the quality of the image. But when uploaded directly to your WordPress media library, these are often stored as full-sized, unoptimized images.

Some themes will automatically resize these photos on a set of dimension pairs. However, many don’t. Suppose your WordPress site is already up and running, and you’re just starting to address this issue. In that case, you don’t need to upload everything on your media library since there are various plug-ins available that will automatically resize them.

You must back up your site before you run tools like this since they might delete or overwrite something you don’t intend to do, and you need to find a way to undo that.

9. Non-existent navigation bar

When people visit sites, the first thing that they want to look for is the navigation bar. They need a system that will allow them to jump from one page to the next.

Think of your navigation bar just like any above-the-fold content. It’s absolutely one of your site’s make-or-break elements. Thus, it would help if you designed it according to performance and functionality.

Over to You

Making these WordPress design blunders isn’t the end. Once you rectify these mistakes, the situation will improve. But as much as you can, try to avoid making these mistakes, as they can harm your success. This can hurt how your brand connects with your customers and vice versa.

Although it’s easier said than done, we hope you can avoid these WordPress mistakes when building your site. Good luck!