Common WordPress Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

Building a website with WordPress is fun and easy, but common WordPress mistakes can turn that excitement into frustration. 

A slow website, security risks, or poor Google rankings often come from minor errors that many beginners (and even experts) make without realizing it. Skipping updates, using too many plugins, or ignoring security can cause significant problems over time. 

But here’s the good news: you don’t have to make these mistakes! 

In this guide, we’ll uncover the most frequent WordPress errors and simple ways to fix them so your site stays fast, secure, and SEO-friendly. 

Let’s dive in and make your WordPress site the best!

Why Security is Crucial for WordPress Websites?

WordPress powers 43.6% of websites on the internet, making it a massive target for hackers. If you don’t take security seriously, your website could be at risk of hacks, malware, and data breaches. 

Let’s break it down in simple terms.

A. Hackers Are Always Looking for Easy Targets

When you ignore WordPress security, hackers look for weak websites that don’t have proper security, and they can:

• Steal your data or customer information.
• Take control of your website and lock you out.
• Install malware that infects your visitors.

B. A Hacked Website Hurts Your Business

If your website gets hacked, it damages your reputation. Visitors might see scary warnings like “This site may be hacked” on Google. That means:

• You’ll lose visitors and customers.
• Your search rankings could drop.
• Fixing the issue can be expensive and time-consuming.

Even if you run a small blog or a personal website, you still need to protect it. Hackers don’t just target big businesses; they attack any website with weak security.

C. WordPress is Popular, And Hackers Target it

WordPress is notable because it’s easy to use and customizable. But because it’s so popular, hackers study its weaknesses and develop automated bots to break into unprotected websites.

If you’re not following basic security practices, you’re making it easy for these bots to:

• Try common passwords to guess your login.
• Exploit outdated themes and plugins.
• Inject harmful scripts that steal data.

D. Recovering from a Hack Can Be a Nightmare

Once your site is hacked, getting it back can be difficult. You might have to:

• Pay for security services to clean your website.
• Restore everything from a backup (if you have one).
• Work hard to regain your search rankings and visitor trust.

That’s why prevention is always better than cure. Securing your website is more straightforward than dealing with the consequences later.

10 Common WordPress Mistakes

1. Choosing the Wrong Hosting Provider

Selecting the right hosting provider is like choosing the foundation for your house; it impacts everything built upon it. Let’s explore how your hosting choice affects your website’s speed, security, and uptime and identify common mistakes to avoid.

Impact of Hosting on Website Speed, Security, and Uptime

• Your hosting provider’s infrastructure determines your site’s loading times. Solid-state drives (SSDs) can improve data retrieval speeds.
• A reputable hosting provider offers robust security measures, including regular malware scans, firewalls, and automatic backups, to protect your site from threats. 
• Many hosting providers guarantee 99.9% uptime, meaning minimal yearly downtime. 

Opt for well-known providers like SiteGround, Bluehost, or Hostinger to avoid choosing the wrong hosting providers. These hosting providers are known for their fast loading speeds, SSD storage, multiple data centers, and a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Moreover, Bluehost, officially recommended by WordPress.org, offers one-click WordPress installation, a free domain for the first year, unmetered bandwidth, and automatic backups. 

Likewise, Hostinger stands out for its affordability, optimized WordPress hosting with LiteSpeed caching, a custom control panel, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

Each host provides strong security, excellent customer support, and scalable solutions, ensuring your website remains fast, secure, and reliable.

2. Using Too Many Plugins (Or the Wrong Ones)

Plugins are like apps for your WordPress site, adding features and enhancing functionality. However, overloading your site with too many plugins or choosing poorly coded ones can slow it down. 

What mistakes can you make?

• Adding numerous plugins can lead to performance issues and potential security vulnerabilities. 
• Using outdated or poorly coded plugins may not follow best practices, leading to compatibility issues and security risks. 
• Not updating plugins regularly can leave your site vulnerable to security threats and bugs.

To avoid these mistakes, before adding a plugin, assess its necessity and check reviews and ratings to ensure it’s well-maintained. Also, unnecessary plugins should be removed to reduce potential security risks and improve site performance. 

In addition, regularly update and test plugins in a staging environment so you can keep your plugins updated with the latest features and security patches. 

Testing in a staging environment prevents potential issues on your live site. 

3. Not Optimizing for Speed and Performance

A fast-loading website is crucial for user satisfaction and search engine optimization (SEO). Studies show that 53% of users abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Additionally, search engines like Google consider page speed a ranking factor, so slower sites may rank lower in search results.

Common mistakes you can make are:

• Not Using Caching Plugins: Failing to use caching can result in slower page load times, as each request is processed anew.
• Uploading Large, Uncompressed Images: High-resolution images that aren’t optimized can significantly slow down your site.
• Using Slow-Loading Themes and Excessive Scripts: Heavy themes and unnecessary scripts can increase load times, affecting performance.

To avoid these mistakes, you can store static versions of your pages using plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache. This will reduce server processing time and speed up load times.

Moreover, plugins like Smush or TinyPNG can compress images without compromising quality, ensuring faster loading. You can also choose performance-optimized themes like Astra or GeneratePress, which are designed for speed and efficiency.

4. Ignoring SEO Best Practices

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for making your website visible to people searching online. When your site ranks higher in search results, more visitors will likely click on it. In fact, the top result in Google is approximately 27.6% of all clicks. 

Common mistakes you’re likely to make:

• Not Setting Up an SEO-Friendly Permalink Structure: Using default or complex URLs can confuse users and search engines.
• Failing to Use an SEO Plugin: Overlooking tools like Rank Math or Yoast means missing out on easy ways to optimize your content, meta descriptions, and more.
• Forgetting to Submit an XML Sitemap to Search Engines: Search engines might not index all your pages without a sitemap, limiting your site’s visibility.

To avoid these, configure permalinks to “Post Name” in WordPress settings. This creates clean, descriptive URLs that are easy to read and understand. And don’t forget to use the SEO plugins. Additionally, submitting an XML sitemap ensures search engines can efficiently crawl and index your site. Hence enhancing its visibility.

5. Not Having a Backup System

Imagine spending countless hours building your WordPress site, only to lose everything due to a hack, server failure, or accidental deletion. This nightmare can become a reality without a proper backup system, leading to significant data loss and downtime. 

What common mistakes can you make?

• Relying Only on Hosting Backups: You may think the hosting provider’s backups are sufficient. However, these backups can be infrequent or incomplete and, in some cases, may not exist. 
• Not Setting Up Automated Backups: Manually backing up your site is time-consuming and easy to forget, leaving your site vulnerable between backups.

In order to avoid these mistakes, use plugins like UpdraftPlus can automate the backup process, ensuring your data is regularly saved without manual intervention. Additionally, save backups to cloud services like Google Drive or Dropbox. This will add an extra layer of security, protecting your data from local failures.

6. Failing to Use a Mobile-Responsive Design

Today, ensuring your website is mobile-friendly is crucial for user experience and SEO. Mobile devices account for over 50% of global internet usage. And if your site doesn’t cater to mobile users, it risks losing a significant portion of its audience.

Common WordPress mistakes you can make:

• Using Outdated, Non-Responsive Themes: Relying on older themes not designed for mobile devices can lead to poor display and functionality on smartphones and tablets.
• Ignoring Mobile Page Speed and User Experience: Neglecting factors like load times and intuitive navigation can frustrate mobile users, leading to higher bounce rates.

You can choose responsive themes designed to work seamlessly across various devices to avoid these mistakes. Also, you can use tools to check how easily a visitor can use your page on a mobile device. This will provide suggestions for improvements.

7. Overlooking User Roles and Permissions

Effectively managing user roles and permissions in WordPress is crucial for maintaining your site’s security and ensuring users have appropriate access levels. Assigning the correct roles helps prevent unauthorized actions and potential security breaches.

For example in the above image we can see there are too many users with admin access, which is not a good practice.

Common WordPress mistakes are:

• Giving Admin Access to Every User: Assigning the Administrator role to multiple users can lead to accidental or malicious changes to your site.
• Not Setting Proper User Permissions: Failing to assign appropriate roles can result in users having more access than necessary, increasing security risks.

You can avoid these mistakes by assigning appropriate roles. WordPress offers predefined roles such as Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber, each with specific capabilities. Assign roles based on each user’s responsibilities. 

Additionally, use plugins for role management. Plugins like Members allow you to create, edit, and manage user roles and capabilities, providing more control over permissions.

8. Neglecting Regular Website Maintenance

If you don’t check your website often, things will break down, slow down, or stop working. Regular maintenance helps keep your site fast, secure, and running smoothly.

Common WordPress mistakes you can make here are:

• Not Checking for Broken Links: When visitors click on a link that doesn’t work, they might leave your site, and it also hurts your site’s SEO.
• Ignoring Database Optimization: Your website collects a lot of data over time, such as comments, spam, and old post revisions. If you don’t clean it up, your site will become slow.
• Skipping Regular Updates: WordPress themes, and plugins need updates to fix bugs and security holes. If you don’t update them, your site becomes an easy target for hackers.

To avoid these mistakes, use a tool like Broken Link Checker to find and fix broken links. You can also use a plugin like WP-Optimize, which can clean up old files, remove spam, and make your site run faster. Besides, set reminders to check for WordPress updates, themes, and plugins. 

Keeping everything up to date keeps your site safe and smooth.

9. Not Prioritizing Website Accessibility

Imagine trying to visit a website, but you can’t read the text because the colors are too light, or you can’t understand the images because there are no descriptions. That would be frustrating, right? 

This is why website accessibility is so important! It ensures everyone, including people with disabilities, can use and enjoy your website.

Accessibility isn’t just about being kind; it also helps your website rank better on Google and attract more visitors. If your website is hard to use, people might leave quickly, which can hurt your SEO.

Some common WordPress mistakes that can happen are:

• Some people have trouble seeing specific colors. It can be challenging to read if your website has low contrast. 
• Alt text helps people who use screen readers understand what the image is about. It also helps with SEO because search engines can’t “see” images and rely on alt text to understand them.

You can avoid these mistakes by building a site following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines provide rules on how to make websites more user-friendly for everyone. These guidelines include using high-contrast colors, clear fonts, and proper text spacing to make content easy to read.

Moreover, WordPress has excellent tools to help with accessibility! Plugins like WP Accessibility check your site and fix common problems. They can help add alt text, improve contrast, and make your site easier to navigate.

So, don’t forget that small changes can make a big difference in making your website friendly for everyone!

10. Ignoring WordPress Security Best Practices

Keeping your WordPress website safe and secure is super important. If you don’t protect your website, hackers can break in, steal information, or even shut your site down. That would be a nightmare!

Some website owners forget about security until something bad happens. But don’t worry! Avoiding a few common mistakes can keep your website safe from trouble.

What are the common mistakes?

• Not Updating WordPress Core: WordPress and its themes and plugins are updated often to fix security problems and bugs. If you don’t update them, hackers can exploit old weaknesses and sneak into your site.
• Using Weak Passwords: A password like “123456” or “password” is too easy for hackers to guess. And using “admin” as your username makes it even easier for them to break in. Hackers use special tools to guess weak passwords in seconds!
• Not Setting Up SSL (HTTPS): If your website doesn’t have HTTPS (a little padlock in the address bar), your site isn’t secure. Without SSL, hackers can steal sensitive data from your visitors, like passwords and personal information.

To keep your site safe, constantly update WordPress, themes, and plugins as soon as new versions are available. You can even turn on automatic updates to make sure you never forget! 

Also, choose a long and unique password, something like “Myp@ssw0rd!#2025” instead of “password123”. Also, turn on 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication), which allows you to enter a second code (from your phone or email) before logging in. 

Moreover, WordPress has some great security plugins like Wordfence or Sucuri. It can block hackers, scan for threats, and protect your site from attacks.

So, don’t ignore your WordPress security and protect your website today!

Final Thoughts

Running a WordPress website isn’t just about setting it up; it’s about keeping it in top shape over time. 

Now that you know the common WordPress mistakes and how to fix them, you’re one step ahead! Small changes, like updating plugins, securing your login, and optimizing for speed, can significantly affect how well your site performs.

So, take time to audit your site, fix any weak spots, and follow best practices. The better you care for your WordPress site, the faster, safer, and more successful it will be! 

Now, put these tips into action and watch your website thrive.