For those who don’t know what that term is, CMS stands for Content Management System, where you can update your website contents and even add new pages without taking your website down by putting the under maintenance page on your home page.
Using WordPress for the first time is not hard. The menu on the left is self-explanatory. It is straightforward to navigate and build a decent website or blog with minimum knowledge while you keep learning as you go along.
What was inevitable at that time was all the mistakes that caused me to lose my website temporarily or waste a lot of time by fixing existing pages and posts after gaining some knowledge.
Please learn about them now. Even if you are using WordPress for some good time, there is a chance that you may not know a few of them so let me start with.
Lesson one – Using a security plugin for my WordPress
This lesson cost me losing my blog, the one which I spent eight months building it. I got my blog hacked, and my heart bounced like crazy while thinking, how can I recover it back. I could log on again, but unfortunately, I lost so many pages and found so many links injected into my blog. Luckily I knew about Google history, so I recovered around 70% of the contents as not all pages were successfully indexed. Lesson learned to use security plugins like WordFence and Sucuri plugins. Since then, I have never had to worry about security.
Lesson two – Using a backup plugin for my WordPress
Of course, I forgot to mention that I could not restore my blog because of a missing WordPress backup when I got hacked.
Please do yourself a favor and consider taking a daily or at least weekly backup and stick to it.
I know it can be a tedious task but with a plugin like Updraft, VaultPress, or BackupBuddy.
You don’t have to use all of them but choose the one you feel is convenient for you and keep using.
Some web hosting does automatic backup for you, and if this is the case for you, I recommend you keep your backup plugin and set it to backup automatically every two weeks.
Lesson three – Using the contact us form
I remember feeling when I put my email address on my first blog.
I was thrilled that my Gmail account was flooded with hundreds of emails, but then I went through all my emails only to find that they were all spam emails.
I realized there are software programs called emails harvester to collect emails on websites by crawling websites one after the other and checking if there are links to other websites, so it is an ongoing process.
Lesson learned – I started using a simple contact form plugin like WpForms or Contact form 7, which completely hides my email and allows the user to communicate with me through the contact form that looks like the one below.
You can add a challenging question using the plugin to eliminate the chance of software tools that auto submit spam emails.
Lesson four – Don’t install so many plugins at the same time.
I remember when I first knew that you could download plugins on your WordPress to achieve so many tasks you can think of as the sky is the limit.
I started downloading so many plugins, even plugins that do the same task, until I got conflicts on my WordPress with all these plugins.
The first issue is that installing so many plugins can slow down your WordPress and cause lousy performance for your WordPress.
The second issue is that so many plugins can cause WordPress to crash as most plugins are free to use.
Lesson learned – I cleaned all plugins with bad reviews and those that cause slow performance.
Now I suggest you follow these top actions after you install WordPress
Lesson Five – Using performance plugin
I was impressed when I tried the performance plugin for many reasons, and I highly recommend using performance plugins like W3 Total Cache and Cloudflare CDN.
First, it optimizes your images to reduce their sizes.
Second, it applies integrated caching to serve the existing visited page from the cache.
Third, it compresses and minifies your code for fast performance.
Lesson Six – Eliminate WordPress clutters
It was tough for me when I started using WordPress to realize that a few actions could help with my WordPress performance and overall folder size.
I learned the following tips to do on your WordPress
- Delete unused plugins or deactivate them. I would instead delete them to reduce WordPress folder size.
- Delete all other themes except the active one.
- Remove all new banners and widgets all over your page.
- Get rid of all history revisions for all published pages using a WP-Sweep plugin. This boosts your posts and page loading time.
- Please remove trash posts and pages, and you don’t need to keep them as they stay in your database.
Lesson Seven – Don’t store your videos on your WordPress hosting.
It was a big mistake to store all videos on my WordPress hosting.
YouTube or Vimeo can store your videos and give you more exposure to your videos.
You need to add the link to your WordPress post or page, and it will be running from YouTube or Vimeo but showing as if they are running from your WordPress.
Lesson Eight – Consider reducing all your WordPress images.
I used to upload all images without considering the file size, and then I realized part of the website performance is related to the multimedia, especially your photos.
You can use a program like IrfanView to reduce images while keeping the quality of your pictures.
Also, you can use some plugins to compress your images, like ShortPixel Adaptive Images.
Conclusion
WordPress is the right choice for your blog or business, and you have to use the right plugins to start with, like security, performance, and backup plugins.
Also, you must research to find the best WordPress hosting.
