WordPress websites have become popular among businesses of all shapes and sizes as they’re easy to manage, flexible and highly-customisable. Despite being an open-source platform, even big brands feel secure when using WordPress.

While there’s many advantages and benefits of using WordPress to grow your business, there’s also a few all-too common mistakes that can prevent you from getting the most out of your website.

Here’s five easy to make mistakes that you should avoid.

1. Not creating a WordPress backup

Security is a huge part of owning a website. Data loss, hardware breakdown and human errors can easily happen at any time so it’s essential to be prepared for your own peace of mind. Due to its popularity, WordPress is a common target of malicious attacks which could compromise your data, and, in a worst case scenario, you may lose your information forever.

As we live in unpredictable times, having both an onsite and an offsite backup solution in place is sensible to help protect your business and ensure the survivability of your data and your business reputation. When done right, a WordPress offsite backup can effectively restore your entire website straight back to its previous condition leaving your business and reputation intact.

2. Not updating to the newest version

Once your website is up and running, there’s a lot to monitor and maintain in terms of WordPress core, theme and plugin updates. Although this process can be time consuming, updates will improve performance, speed, usability, management, compatibility, and security.

If you fail to update to the latest core, theme and plugins, you will open yourself up to potential attacks or vulnerabilities. The team behind WordPress continue to make WordPress as safe as possible and release security updates if any exploits are found, which is why you need to undertake regular maintenance of your site.

3. Not optimising your website for SEO

No matter what your website is about, a basic understanding of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will help increase traffic and grow the number of customers. A WordPress SEO-friendly website will make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your website through page titles, meta descriptions, headings, links and keywords.

There are many on-page SEO techniques that can be easily implemented to improve your chances of ranking highly in search engines. Take your time to gain an understanding of SEO and how Google’s algorithm works for more traffic and conversions.

4. Not regularly testing the performance of your website

In our fast-paced world, we expect websites to load instantly or we move straight on to the next option on the list. We have high expectations on the content we access online and refuse to wait for longer than necessary.

Whether it’s down to a bad hosting provider, poor code or too many unoptimised images, there are many reasons why a WordPress website is running slowly. As faster websites result in a better user experience, it’s worth the time and effort in investigating how to speed up your WordPress site if it’s become sluggish. You can check the current speed of your website here.

5. Not cleansing spam comments

If you’re a WordPress website owner, it’s likely you’ve received annoying spam comments at least once. In fact, it is not uncommon for some sites to receive hundreds or even thousands of comments every week. You may be tempted to leave a backlog of unapproved comments due to the time and effort it takes to look through them, however, this can greatly reduce the size of your WordPress database.

If your WordPress database keeps getting filled with spam comments that are not actioned, it weighs down your database and making your website sluggish. To avoid slowing down your page loading times it’s vital to keep on top of the comments being accumulated in the backend.

The question to ask yourself is, “am I using WordPress to its full capacity and capability?” If you commit any of the mistakes listed above, then you know you are not, but luckily there’s several ways to avoid these. If you don’t have the time or knowledge to rectify this yourself, you can call upon the professionals to do it for you.

WP Tech Support provides regular maintenance and monitoring of your WordPress website to ensure you’re getting the most out of this versatile platform. Take a look at our great value monthly payment plans to find out more.