If you are a new food blogger and you chose WordPress this post for 10 top WordPress mistakes to avoid is for you. Knowing the most common mistakes can help you prevent them and focus on growing your food blog.
We spent the time organizing the most common mistakes and come up with our list of the top 10 WordPress mistakes to avoid for food bloggers. Let’s take a look below at these top WordPress mistakes.
10 Top WordPress Mistakes to Avoid
First, congratulations on your choice for CMS. As many people do not know WordPress powers over 35% of the websites globally. After you picked a domain name and a hosting provider it is time for you to set the CMS.
Installing WordPress Incorrectly
WordPress is the most common platform used for websites as it is simple to build a website and to update, mistakes occur often. One of the top WordPress mistakes is setting the wrong URL. You have to set ‘https’ to avoid issues later and the easiest way is to use the build-in most of the hosting providers easy WordPress setup.
Make sure you also check if your current hosting supports WordPress installation and also your template requirements. This will saves you tons of time later and prevent WordPress errors.
Forget to Configurate WordPress Permalink Settings
Permalink is the permanent URL or address of the pages, post, category and tags where your content can be accessed. The visitor can use this address to visit your website and it is good to remember and well accepted for bots to scan your website.
After you installed successfully your WordPress website is time to configure your permalink settings. This is something some people forget and end up with ugly non-SEO-friendly URLs.
Remember that one of the factors for SEO is to have a clean and SEO-friendly URLs.
Not Choosing the Right WordPress Theme
Your theme should be simple and professional look. make it easy for your visitors to navigate through your website. This is one of the top WordPress mistakes most people do by choosing a wrong template that doesn’t suit your goals.
Using themes not just saves you tons of time but can also save you a lot of money. There are many places you can purchase a high-quality WordPress template for a little as $50-$60. Here we’ll mention just a few of them: Envato, Elegantthemes, TemplateMonster and more.
These templates come with dummy content and can be installed in just a 5mins. They also usually come with the support that can help you with any issues during setup. But one of the main criteria is to choose a theme that is using SEO best practices.
Not Setting up Automated Backups
Most people forget to do backups and in many cases, they end up in a really frustrating situation. Backing up can actually be done automatically without you lifting a finger. But most people are trying to do it manually and from time to time without realizing that there easier ways.
Don’t underestimate the importance of backup. This is one of the top WordPress mistakes for new and experienced bloggers. You can set automatic backups from your cPanel, use plugins or check with your hosting. In most cases, the hosting companies are making copies but it is always good to be sure you have a backup for yourself too.
High-quality hosting providers can do the backups for you or you can use one of the many WordPress plugin solutions available out there. Here are just a few examples: Duplicator, UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy (paid), VaultPress (paid).
Always do a backup before any updates to WordPress framework, themes or plugin updates!
Skipping WordPress Updates
Security of your blog is the main aspect to prevent anyone to hack your blog and misuse it. One way to do this is by keeping your WordPress framework and plugins up to date. Don’t forget to do a backup before starting updates. If you are using a theme check for the latest updates from the developer as well. Keeping everything up to date will improve your security.
Not securing your website is another one from our list with the top WordPress mistakes. You can also add some really good plugins to be sure you have strong protections against bots or any harmful scripts out there. Some really good ones are Wordfence, iThemes Security, Shield Security.
Using Too Many Unnecessary Plugins
Try to install only plugins that you really need. Keep the plugins up to 20 max. Adding many plugins to your blog can affect your blog ranking and your blog performance, causing a slow loading speed of your page and conflicts with the functionality. This is one of the top WordPress mistakes that people do by having 40 and more plugins and their website is getting slow and hurting the Google ranking.
There are over 30k plugins available free and paid that can be used to expand the functionality of your website. Some things can be done without the need for plugins, other plugins can combine features of a few plugins and this way can help you reduce the number of total WordPress plugins.
Not Setting up Google Analytics
When you have your site live you’ll want to know how is performing. Google Analytics is still the best way to gather information about your visitors, how they found you, referral websites,
Realizing that you do not have a Google Analytics connection to your website is one of the top WordPress mistakes new food bloggers do. If you have some coding skills you can hardcode in your website but there are easier ways like using plugins that can do the work for you.
Not Resizing Your Images
You decided to start your food blog you have a nice website and great pictures but there is one problem you do not realize. Your pictures are too big. Don’t post pictures right of the camera. They are too large and heavy for your website causing slower loading time. No matter how beautifull are your recipe photos you have to remember speed is an important factor.
You can use either online tool like compressor.io, or plugins like smushit that optimize your images, turn on lazy load for you, compress, resize, and improve your Google Page Speed.
You do not have to use your original images. You can size them for your website and make it easy for loading. If you are familiar you can use Adobe Photoshop or Gimp.
Not Monitoring your Website Performance
Your website performance is very important for your SEO. One of the top WordPress mistakes that people after installing their WordPress and theme focused on blog posts but do not monitor the site speed.
Slow speed is really annoying for your visitors and often they will not wait if it is more than 3 secs. Today over 60% of the traffic is done from mobile devices and if your website is slow you’ll be loosing a big chunk of your traffic.
Fast and well optimized website with fewer plugins as possible is better for your users and for your SEO ranking.
Not Building an Email List
As we mentioned in some of our other posts it is very important to start building your email list from the beginning. You can use WordPress plugins to set a subscribe option in your blog or use embedded code from top platforms as GetResponse, Mailchimp, ConverKit and more.
While growing your social media followers is important for your brand and website as well you do not actually own your followers emails. When you build your own email list you can actually promote at any time products or posts directly to your subscribers.