Ground Report

WordPress is an extraordinary CMS, and the global giants like The New Yorker, BBC America, Sony Music, MTV News, PlayStation.Blog, Xerox, Best Buy Quartz, Bata, Ford Social, Time Inc. and many others have built there websites on this solid and reliable platform. Thousands of new WordPress blogs are released everyday.

However, there are possibilities that human mistakes can happen while doing WordPress development. If you are a developer or a business owner planning to have a WordPress site, then it is essential to know the possibilities of making a mistake and the common blunders developers make while using WordPress plugins and tools. Let us further discuss a few of such mistakes and how to fix them.

• Extravagant plugin installation

While planning for a WordPress site, the key to success is always thinking minimally and being simplistic. So, be balanced when the matter is of installing plugins. You can see that the plugin center has nearly 50,000 plugins, and you may feel tempted to try as much as possible to make your portal more featured. However, such an immature act can cause your site go snail slow.

Ideal move: Always choose plugins wisely based on your exact use and purpose. Also uninstall it once if the plugins you downloaded is not in use. While considering a plugin, always ask yourself whether it is mandatory to have its functionality on the site which you are developing (client site or for yourself).

• Neglecting the importance of SEO

WordPress is an easy to build CMS, and many developers who use it undervalue the importance of doing search engine optimization. Online market is highly competitive and you are missing an opportunity on publishing anything online without giving any thought for new SEO Plans.

If you have promotional interests on maintaining a portal (there is scarcely someone who doesn’t have), it is very important to plan your content, images, videos, headers, URL naming everything to make it search engine and user friendly and ensure easy visibility online.

Ideal move: It is ideal to download a user-friendly SEO plugin for WordPress like Yoast. It will make the SEO process easier for even the novice developers to master the game by offering handy SEO inputs and tips to make your site rank higher.

• Using no images

What would you feel on seeing a web page jammed with only text to read through. You may find it as going through a research paper, which is not digestive to common men.

While making a web page, it is imperative to add attractive and worthy images to hold the reader’s attention. People are not much interested to read through the text that is why infographics and other simplest mode of information sharing are in high demand.

Studies have shown that contents featuring apt visuals get 90% more views and users stay back on such pages than those with only text walls. It is also a fact that human brain can process a visual 60000 times faster than interpreting text inputs. So, WordPress developers should include relevant images within the content to enhance readership.

Ideal move: As for most of the developers, if buying from stock photography is your concern, there are plenty of free images too available online for you to instantly use. However, while using free images, just give attribution to the photographers or painters as required.

• Not doing appropriate resizing of images

WRT the above point, as per the SEOAdviSe experts, another big mistake WordPress developers make is not resizing the images for web upload. This will surely slow down your site and in turn increase the bounce rate to make your site less popular. You can use PhotoShop or other WordPress plugins to size down the images so that these won’t take a huge chunk of space.

Ideal move: Go to Image > Image Size in PhotoShop and reduce the resolution to around 72. You can then try decreasing the size to about 600 – 1000 pixels on displaying it on a regular site. Check for the file size and calculate how much bandwidth is needed to get the images loaded when someone visits the site. On checking the “Resample” option, the dimension of the image will automatically get reduced when you adjust the resolution. You can use WordPress plugins like WPSmush to do this task in a much easier way.

3. Not backing up a site

If you are a professional WordPress developer, then it is essential to consistently back up your clients’ websites. If not, it is a mistake like spending the entire day writing an article on MS Word, but never press the ‘save’ button. Keep on backing up your work from time to time in order not to lose anything.

Ideal move: There is a range of plugins available for WordPress to do auto back of the sites. Some hosting service providers also offer automatic backups on demand so that you don’t have to worry about losing anything. Ensure every aspects of your site is kept safe including database, plugin, theme, uploads, and the core files.

• Keeping the default permalink structure

The default permalink structure of WordPress is not search engine optimized. You have to change this to the permalink structure of the websites you develop. It is essential to win better article rankings. This is a very easy task to accomplish, but many of them simply ignore and thereby ending up in a poor performance online.

Ideal move: Change permalink structure as default while doing WordPress development. For this, go to the Settings -> Permalinks and then select the “Post name” tab. If the site has existing old content, redirect the old permalinks to new ones. There are also redirect tools for WordPress to automatically generate redirecting from old permalink to the new ones.

Last, but not the least, using poor web hosting services may also spoil your entire effort of building an excellent WordPress portal as you are pouring in cheap quality fuel into your new Lamborghini. Take care of all these aspects if you are planning for a WordPress site development in order to ensure a better SEO performance, user experience, and ultimately online business success.