4 WordPress Development Mistakes To Avoid

Out of the 1 million most visited sites that are run on CMS, 55% of them function on WordPress. It is one of the finest CMSs available, which is robust and easy to use. WordPress remains a favorite among other CMSs because it supports multi-users and multi-blogging apart from being a free open source platform. With so many options available to you with WordPress, it’s easy to commit mistakes ranging from trivial to disastrous.

Here are 4 of the most common WordPress Development-related mistakes and tips on how you can avoid them:

1. Incorrect platform selection

Signing up to build your first WordPress site can be a puzzling experience for you. You have a choice between two WordPress platforms, i.e. wordpress.com and wordpress.org. If you are a blogger or an artist and are not keen on spending any money on creating your personal space online to display your creations, wordpress.com can be a good choice. The platform is free of cost but certain features like custom domain name and customizable themes are not available. Wordpress.org, on the other hand, comes with increased control and responsibilities. It allows you to customize your website or blog completely and lets you choose your customized domain name and hosting providers.

2. Failing to update and take a backup

In 2013 alone, WordPress released 7 upgrades out of which 4 were security or maintenance releases. This means that a bug or a security exposure was identified and WordPress released a fix for it. So, if you find updating releases a boring task, you need to pull up your socks. Missing any important release may expose you to the risk of bugs, hacking or site crash. However, before updating the release, it is very important to create a backup. Just in case anything goes wrong, you can immediately restore data from the backup and you can have your site up and running within minutes using the latest backup.

3. Not changing the default permalink structure

A permalink is a permanent static hyperlink to a specific page on a site. WordPress automatically creates a numeric permalink every time a new page is created, something like- www.site.com/?p=50. For better online visibility, remember to change the default permalink into a more SEO-friendly structure to gain high rankings in SERPs. An SEO-friendly permalink displays efficiency and gives your brand value a boost.

To change your default permalink structure, you need to go to Dashboard>Settings > Permalinks.

4. Not updating salts and keys

Salts and keys are security features provided by WordPress. They safeguard your site against hackers. Updating your salts and keys will force all logged in users to log in again, because changing them automatically invalidates the login of any user who is logged in. Existing keys are hard to crack and changing them creates another layer of difficulty.

Therefore, now that you know the 4 common mistakes to avoid while developing portals on the WordPress platform, you can avoid committing them. You will get better with practice and will find that every site you build will be better than the previous one in some way. Even when you make mistakes, remember that experience is a great teacher.

---

Hire Wordpress Developer India