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7 Common Errors Made by WordPress Beginners and How to Avoid Them

It is well-known that WordPress is the most popular blogging platform on the internet. It is a free, open source blogging and content management system (CMS) that is used by millions of websites of every kind for all sorts of reasons. As such, it is often the first & only platform that newbie bloggers and site owner’s come into contact with to start their websites, and this naturally results in many beginners making a lot of common errors.

This post walks you through 7 of the most common errors made by beginning WordPress users and how to avoid them.

Wordpress Blogging Mistakes

Seven Common Mistakes Made by WordPress Blogging Beginners

1. Sub-Folder Installation

File structure knowledge is not something one would expect a beginner to know. It is therefore a common error by newbies to install WordPress in a folder named “WordPress”. Hence, the default location of the site becomes “Yoursite.com/Wordpress” instead of “Yoursite.com”. This occurs because WordPress asks users to insert the name of the directory or leave blank to install in the Home or Root directory. Newbies often assume, quite understandably, that the script should be installed in a directory named WordPress. This is wrong, the directory field should be left blank unless you specifically want to install WordPress in a separate directory, for example, where your site runs on a different CMS platform but you want the blog to run on WordPress.

2. Failure to use Permalinks

You should know that permalinks are the WordPress URL structure and they are very important to set properly. Many beginners fail to use permalinks, thus, the default URL is set as “yoursite.com/?p=”, where postid is a number. This is not good for search engine optimization. Permalinks allow you to configure relevant and memorable URLs. Instead of having a number as the URL, you would have the article title as the URL. To configure this simply edit the post slug in the post editor to either use postname (/%postname%/), day and post name (/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) or category and post name (/%category%/%postname%/), depending on your preferences. I would recommend using post name in most cases.

3. Publishing While Still Incomplete

This is dead giveaway that you are a newbie and not ready to launch your site. Beginners often have the habit of publishing pages that are still drafts or going live with a site that is still in the process of building. The result is a bad browsing experience for site visitors. And, if you are using the blog to launch a business, publishing incomplete pages can do irreparable damage to your brand. There are a number of free plugins that can help you keep your site in “under construction” or “maintenance mode” until you are ready to go live.

4. Installing Unnecessary Plugins

In their excitement to experiment with the platform and check out all the cool things wordpress can do, newbies will often try out every plugin that appeals to them. In the process, they end up with dozens of plugins that they don’t really need. Plugins suck up site hosting resources and bloat your code, so you should only have the bare minimum that you need. Also, remember to deactivate any plugins that you aren’t using.

5. Failure to Install Updates

The WordPress platform, themes and plugin developers often release updates to improve functionality and patch security holes. Failure to install an update once it is available not only makes you lose out on new features but also exposes your site to hackers. For example, in 2007, a study found that the majority WordPress blogs were running on outdated versions exposing them to hackers.

In 2013, another study also found that 50 of the most popular plugins were vulnerable to XSS and SQL injection attacks. Therefore, anytime you see a plugin update notification, do so immediately. Luckily, updates on WordPress 3.7 and higher are done automatically so you no longer need to worry about updates to the WordPress core, but it is still a good idea to check just in case.

6. Using a Weak Password

Forget everything you have seen in hacking movies. The most common way to gain unauthorized access into an online property is by guessing the username and password. It is shocking that the vast majority of people stil use usernames and passwords that are easily guessable. A common password is “123456” and “password”. It is also common for newbies to use “Admin” or their first name as the WordPress admin username. When it comes to usernames and passwords, you have to make them complicated. Choose a username that you can remember easily but one which cannot easily be guessed by even the people who are closest to you. A good password should have a minimum of eight characters and should be a combination of uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters.

If you are afraid you might create a password that may be too complex for you to remember, there are many free password management tools that store all your passwords securely. You can also write it down and save it in multiple locations.

7. Failure to Backup Often

Many newbies fail to see the dangers of not backing up. They only realize the importance of backups when their site is hacked or something goes wrong with their hosting account and they lose all their content. This is despite the fact that backing up a WordPress site only takes a click or two. You can backup to your computer, use a free backup service or a commercial service. Trust me, there is nothing worse than waking up one day to find out your entire site has been lost! I’ve had it happen and I don’t wish it upon anyone. This can be avoided by backing up often.

Conclusion

WordPress is undoubtedly the easiest CMS and blogging platform to use. With its large developer community, there are plugins and themes to do just about anything, so you need not worry about learning how to code. Adhering to the points laid out above will ensure you get the most out of an excellent blogging platform without giving yourself any unnecessary headaches.

7 Powerful WordPress Plugins to Turbocharge Your Blogs Performance

A key factor in both visitor satisfaction and keeping the search engines happy right now is making sure that your blog loads quickly. There should be no errors, no waiting – just click and boom the content is ready for your visitors.

If, for whatever reason, your blog is running slowly then it can affect your online business in a number of ways. Firstly people aren’t willing to wait around for pages to load anymore.

They used to say you had 30 seconds to grab a visitors attention and in the days of dial-up internet access that was true but today a guesstimate is that you have at most 10 seconds before the surfer hits the back button and goes looking somewhere else for what they want.

Secondly if your blog is loading slowly it can directly affect your search engine rankings. Slower sites don’t do as well in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

So it’s important that your WordPress blog is hosted with a reliable company that have no real latency issues but it’s equally important that you optimize your WordPress blog with plugins that help reduce the page load time as much as possible.

Before you get carried away just make sure that you test the actual speed of your blog first – you might not need to make any changes. You can run a speed test here -> http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Then if you decide you want to optimize your WordPress blog speed here are 7 of the very best plugins you can use to help achieve this goal:

1. WP Smush.It – This plugin automatically reduces the size of image files on the fly so they will load more quickly. Very neat and very effective.

2. WP HTTP Compression – By outputting your pages in zip format to a compatible browser the WP HTTP Compression plugin can reduce your page size by up to 80% as well as increasing your download speeds by up to 4 times. It shouldn’t be used in conjunction with WP Super Cache however.

3. Hyper Cache – If your blog is hosted by a provider without a whole pile of cutting edge resources then this plugin is ideal for you. It’s very easy to configure and is automatically optimized to reduce disk usage for your blog.

4. WP Optimize – This is a very simple but very effect database clean up tool and allows you to run database maintenance without using PhpMyAdmin as well as clearing out your spam or comment queue with a couple of clicks.

5. WP Super Cache – This very neat plug created HTML files from your WordPress blog data and serves those instead. This reduces the overhead on the server dishing out the files because the SQL database for your WordPress install isn’t constantly involved or being queried. A very neat solution but check its compatibility with other plugins or themes you might be using.

6. WP Minify – This plugin helps you compress JavaScript and CSS files to make sure that pages load more quickly. Most theme developers don’t take the time to optimize their CSS so this plugin can really help with that problem and speed up your blog loading time as a result.

7. Hosting Monitor Plugin – This cool plugin allows you to check host up-time, hardware info, load average and the current users. Basically it allows you to keep tabs on your web host to make sure they are not the cause of your blog suffering from any speed problems. It’s one thing for a web host to claim 99.9% up-time… But it’s another thing to actually do it.

Hopefully you’ll find at least some of these plugins useful for when you’re doing your best to optimize your WordPress blog. Remember that the overall visitor experience is critical to you achieving the kind of massive and loyal online audience that you want.

Don’t let the fans down eh?

How to Change Your WordPress Blog Header

The theme I am using on my blog right now is free. Since it is free, it means that I have to customize it myself. I didn’t like how the header was looking because it had my blog tagline overlapping with my blog title.

I had to change it for 2 reasons. I didn’t like it and I had to brand myself. I couldn’t figure out how to change, but a wordpress designer told me what I should do.

How Can You Change Your Blog Header

You need to look at the source code of your blog from your browser. You have to go to your homepage. Right click on any place on the screen (not on any link). Go to View Page Source. When the source code opens, hold Ctrl + F. This will bring the find box. You want to look for the location of the header code. In the find box, type in body. It would take you to the body code i.e. <body>

The next line in the body area is the header. In my case, it was

<div id="ja-mainwrapper">

I downloaded my theme to my pc. I went to the images folder (…../theme/images). I looked for the word “mainwrapper”. I noticed on an image that had a blue background like my header and it was called main wrap. So I decided to rename my new header image as main wrap and deleted the old image. I uploaded the theme back to my wordpress.

Then I went to my header.php. I commented out the title and the tagline. I did this by using <!– –>. The space in between the dashes is where the text I want to comment goes into.

What Blogging Platform is Recommended

The recommended blogging platform depends on what you want. There are many different blogging platform that you can use to blog. It depends on you, the webmaster to choose what best fits your needs. There is a list of weblogs at wikipedia. Among all the blogging platforms, some platforms needs you to download and install, some are open source and free, some are proprietary software that may be licensed for a fee or have versions available free of charge.

From the choice of platform of the top 100 blogs, you will see that WordPress is the most used platform. Not only with the A-list bloggers, wordpress is the most used platform in the blogosphere overall.

Why does the A-list bloggers use their platform. I don’t know why, but I can speak from my experience with blogger, wordpress.com, wordpress.org.

1. Blogger – This is a free blogging service owned by Google. It is easy to use. This is the recommended blogging platform to start with if you are looking for a free service to get going on quickly and easily. Most bloggers start with this one to get a feel of how to blog on a software. But it has its disadvantages. One of them is that it doesn’t allow you to customize your blog very much. Register with Blogger.

2. WordPress.org – This is a free open source platform that needs to be hosted on your server. At first, it seems complicated to use, but gradually it would become easy. WordPress allows you to do anything you want. You can customize it to your taste. The only major disadvantage is that it needs constant update to keep up with security issues. Download and install WordPress

3. WordPress.com – This is the free version of wordpress.org that is easier to use but doesn’t have the full functionality. It is updated constantly by the wordpress team. The only disadvantage is that it doesn’t allow Javascript code. You need javascript code to run adsense, analytics, and some affiliate links. Get wordpress.com blog.

I recommend using hosted wordpress.org if you can afford a webhost. You just have to be sure to update it often. But for beginners, blogger is recommended to get a feel of the blogging waters.