Setting up a WordPress site is easy but there are several small yet important aspects that you need to know. To get the best performance out of your WordPress site, you need to know what are the mistakes that you should avoid at any cost.

If you are new to WordPress and looking for important tips to follow while setting up the site, we have you covered. In this post, we will have a look at the top seven mistakes that people generally make while setting up their site.

Avoid following mistakes while setting up a WordPress site

1. Choosing cheap web hosting

WordPress.org is a free and cutting platform, however, to make the best use of it, you need to have the best hosting plan. If the overall hosting is slower then it will not only ruin the user experience but also increase the bounce rate. A higher bounce rate can hamper your complete SEO efforts and let your competitors outperform you.

So, it’s important that while setting up a WordPress site, pick a reliable web hosting on which you can trust. The majority of the web hosting providers ensure 99.98% of uptime, but before being anyone, read their online reviews and rating. Read real reviews on third-party websites before finalizing the hosting.

Shared hosting is a good option to get started, but if you can spend a little more, then it’s highly recommended to go for cloud hosting. It is because cloud hosting is a dedicated server that ensures higher loading speed for your website. You can also take help from a reliable web development company that will help you with the same.

2. Not optimizing multimedia

We all love to greet our visitors with high-resolution images and videos. However, these high-resolution images and videos can slow down the overall loading speed. So, while developing the website, make sure you optimize the multimedia to keep the speed intact. There are several ways you can compress and optimize both images and videos.

As speed has become a major ranking factor to earn top organic positions, you can’t overlook the importance of optimizing multimedia. There are many lossless image compression tools available that are free to use for image optimization. Along with this, you can also use a content delivery network or CDM to manage the server load and increase performance.

3. Not using SSL certificate

Gone are those days when launching websites without an SSL certificate was fine. However, as search engines are primarily focusing on overall customer experience and security, SSL is vital. To put it simply, if your website is running on HTTP, then it does not have an SSL certificate. On the other hand, if your website is running on an HTTPS protocol, it. This means that your website has an SSL certificate.

No matter if you have a personal branding website, an E-commerce platform, or an enterprise website, it’s important to have an SSL certificate. If you plan to buy one for your website, contact your hosting service provider and get suitable for your platform. Similar to your web hosting, you also need to renew your SSL certificate to ensure it’s working intact.

4. Not monetizing the platform

WordPress gives you full freedom to monetize your platform and earn money from your content or by selling products. If you want to earn money through your website, you need to make the products easy to buy for your customers. For doing this, you can use plugins like Easy Digital Downloads. It helps you sell your digital products to customers easily.

On the other hand, you can also use the WooCommerce plugin to turn your website into a full-fledged E-Commerce store. By doing this, you can easily list, sell and start earning from the very first day of your website launch.

5. Ignoring the security plugin

With growing digitization, the security threats are also growing and you need to pay special attention to your website’s security. While using WordPress. You have multiple ways to add more security to your website to protect it from various security attacks. Some of the common security threats are brute force attacks, DDoS attacks, phishing attacks, and so on. To ensure your website and the users remain safe, it’s important that you use certain security plugins to level up the security.

File integrity is an amazing feature that keeps you updated if someone changes some code of your WordPress site so that you can act upon it immediately. You can use a WP Security Audit Log plugin to set up this feature on your website. One thing you need to keep in mind is that you have to keep the plugin updated so that it protects your website from all possible chances of code forgery.

In addition to this, malware is a serious problem that you need to deal with when you own a website. You can use a free plugin called Wordfence Security as it will scan all the files for malware that you download for your website. If there is something malicious, you will get instant notification from the plugin.

6. Not using auto-updates

WordPress is constantly updating and to ensure you get the best performance every time, you need to keep it updated with the latest firmware. Instead of installing the updates manually, it’s better to keep the updates on automation. It will save you a lot of time and effort.

You can use plugins like JetPack to ensure all the updates are done automatically and you don’t have to work manually on them. It becomes especially important when you are using a lot of plugins and third-party services with your website.

7. Not using a CDN

CDN or a content delivery network is an additional server to manage your images and bigger files. By integrating a CDN, your website’s all you’re bigger files and images are copied on the server which responds faster when visitors request them. When your website will have a large number of pages, images, and files, then a CDN network will come in handy.

Wrapping up!

Avoid these mistakes and ensure top-notch performance for your website. Gain an edge over your competitors by skipping these things and improving the overall performance.

Author Bio:

With over 13 years of experience as a leader in digital marketing, Mansi Rana is Managing Director of EZ Rankings. Passionate about all things data; providing actionable business intelligence in digital, future tech; and venture bubbles categories for everyone, everywhere.

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