5 WordPress mistakes that beginner users should avoid

When we start using WordPress whether for personal or professional use for the first time, sooner or later we made WordPress mistakes. In this post, I will enumerate my top 5 WordPress mistakes that beginner users should avoid.

1.- Not Change Permalinks

Wait, What is a permalink? According with Wikipedia:

A permalink (portmanteau of permanent link) is a URL that points to a specific web page, often a blog or forum entry which has passed from the front page to the archives, or the result of a search in a database.

The permalink in WordPress by default is http://mydomain.com/?p=<postid>, but this is not, pretty, informative or SEO friendly, we want to use human readable permalink.

As beginner users, we do not change the default permalink structure, but we should.

I do prefer the (/%postname%) structure, when we use this structure, the permalink is: http://mydomain.com/the-post-title, much much better.

2.- Ignore WordPress Updates

Behind WordPress exist a full developers community who work hard to keep WordPress secure and adding improvements and features.

Once in a while the WordPress team released updates that you as user must install to keep your site up to date.

Not only the WordPress itself must be up to date; your themes and plugins need to be updated with the latest versions.

By default WordPress 3.7 or higher use the auto-update feature.

I encourage you to review your updates once in a while.

3.- Forgot to backup

We remember the backup when our site is down and inaccessible, right? Backup his is the most important point, and we not always create a proper backup.

Some hosting services as WPEngine create daily backups automatically every single day and have the option to create a new backup point at any time, this saves us a lot of problems.

If you host your site in a service with no automatic backups you can use free plugins as UpdraftPlus, with this plugin we can automating the process and upload the backups to Dropbox or Google Drive.

4.- Use a weak password

A strong password is the golden rule not just for your WordPress Administrator Account is a golden rule for each service you use.

A password not must be easy to remember, please do not use your grandma name or your birthday date. Yes a password must see like this:

You can use services like http://www.whatsmyip.org/random-password-generator/ and if you want to go further, I recommend using a Password Manager Application, I use 1Password all the time or LastPass.

5.- Use Nulled Themes or Plugins

We like a Premium WordPress Theme or a Premium WordPress Plugin, but we don’t have the budget or simple we don’t want to pay for it. The first thing is search the web for a nulled or cracked version.

The people who crack the theme or plugin 99% of the times add malicious code in the files and without notice. And once we have the new shiny theme or plugin installed on our site, this become in a kidnapped site, the malicious code can add redirects, inject links, send span, add ads, etc.

So please, do not use nulled scripts at all.

Can you tell more mistakes that beginners make? Please let me know in the comments.