These days, plenty of small business owners are turning to WordPress to create their DIY business site. Unfortunately, DIY-ing a business website could go either way. And unfortunately, lots of small business owners are guilty of these common WordPress mistakes that could damage their online marketing efforts. Below are these mistakes and what you can do about them.
Selecting a Theme Because of Style Instead of Substance
The first thing you need to do when open a WordPress account to build your business website is to decide on what theme you should use. The thing is, the WordPress theme repository offers more than 2,000 free themes and countless individual developers and theme shops also offer thousands of different WordPress themes. With countless themes out there, it’s fairly easy to get overwhelmed and end up with a theme that looks stylish but doesn’t really suit your specific business needs.
To pick the perfect theme for your business website, consider first which functionality you need to effectively communicate your business’ message and perform crucial actions for your business like selling your products, make readers contact you for more information about your services, or create an email list. In most cases, it’s better to create a site build from a simple theme and just a couple of necessary plugins instead of buying a nice-looking theme that won’t do anything for your business.
Relying on Default Settings in WordPress
WordPress is popular for its customization settings, but before customizing your site, check out the default settings first, including login page URLs, page titles, database table prefixes, and admin usernames, advises an experienced WordPress digital marketer from a renowned SEO company in Virginia. Failing to customize these defaults could undermine your SEO strategy and result in security risks. Start with updating your page titles since these will be displayed in your post and page URLs. Make sure to optimize them for search engines and avoid editing the URL of a post without first making a redirect, or else your URLs with display error messages. Additionally, update all admin usernames as well as your site’s tagline and title.
Forgetting About Backup and Maintenance
After spending money and time creating a WordPress site or having one professionally made, many owners of small businesses forget about safeguarding their investment. However, making the time conduct regular maintenance tasks and backups could mean the difference between having a fully functional website and a barely functioning one. If you experience a server issue, malicious hacking, or a corrupted database, you can get your site back online easily and quickly by simply restoring your most current backup. Otherwise, you’d have to rebuild your site, which could, in turn, cost you more money and time.
It’s entirely possible to create a fully functioning business website by using WordPress. But by taking the necessary time and effort to make smart decisions early on and having the discipline required to maintain your website, you too can have a business site that will work as hard as you do.
