WordPress is a popular way to develop high-performance and smooth websites cost-effectively. However, it does not come without faults of its own. In a bid to develop many sites in haste, WordPress development teams often commit mistakes that prove expensive in the long run.
Not that it’s the end of the world if you make a mistake developing your WordPress site, but if it’s avoidable, let’s avoid it, right? Let’s see the most common mistakes developers make when building websites using WordPress and avoid them.
Common WordPress development failures and how to prevent them
Not making data backups
There could be many reasons why someone loses their critical data in this day and age- data theft, human errors, hacking attempts, and more. Data loss can make your website useless unless you have essential backups to restore to the site.
Loss of data can compel you to restart from scratch and cause loss of resources, money and effort. The solution? Take a few minutes to set up automated backups for your website. Various WordPress backup plugins allow you to back up your files locally as well as on a remote server.
A few popular ones include UpdraftPlus, BackupBuddy, VaultPress, BlogVault and BackWPup.
Using common names for classes, variables, functions and constants
When developing a plugin, it’s a coding best practice to use a naming convention that differentiates your code from that of a different plugin. This is why developers would usually prefix the names of their variables with something unique related to the plugin itself.
On the other hand, some developers prefer to use PHP namespaces to solve two distinct issues-
Depending on whether it’s a new project or an old one that you’re extending, you may need to stick with the existing coding style in the latter case. But it can be fruitful to stick with a uniform coding standard throughout the code.
Failing to leverage the full potential of WP core
WordPress comes with a host of existing functionality that can be simply called in themes and plugins. Often developers mistake including files in their assets directory that are already available in the core files.
This leads to bigger package size, longer loading time and slow performance. Besides, you will need to ensure time and again that all third-party libraries are regularly updated.
Be sure to leverage what WP has to offer by default, and you will have a lightweight WP site or theme or plugin that is automatically upgraded to the latest version and is therefore secure and robust.
Choosing a random theme
One of the areas developers take for granted is choosing the theme for a site. Answer the following questions to decide which kind of theme would be the best for you-
Test a few WP themes based on the factors above to decide on one that works best for you.
Not optimizing the site for SEO
If your website is not optimized for SEO, it’s practically non-existent. That’s the truth about search engines. If they can’t locate your site, how will the users? It’s important to implement SEO basics on your site to stand a chance for some visibility online.
Here are a few steps to take:
Not handling WP updates
Outdated plugins, themes and even WP core cause reduced site speed, site crashes and compromised security. WordPress developer teams release regular updates that fix bugs and loopholes in plugins, themes and the WordPress core.
Update WP plugins as soon as updates are available to safeguard your site against malicious attackers scouring the internet for sites that were not updated and are now left more vulnerable than before.
Not optimizing the site for speed
One of the most crucial factors that affects site experience is speed. Google takes into account site speed in ranking websites on both mobile and desktop. Optimizing your site for speed can prevent visitors from prematurely fleeing your site and arriving at competitors.
One of the ways to optimize for speed is by installing a caching plugin. Another could be to optimize images and rich media for the internet so that the site isn’t under load and bots up quickly.
Installing too many bells and whistles
Plugins can bring innovative functionality to your site, but too much can harm the user experience. A bad plugin can severely damage your site’s overall performance, jeopardize security, and do more harm than good.
Aim for quality over quantity. And make sure all the plugins you install come from reputable online sources.
Sidestep these common ways to failure with WP site development with expert developers from KiwiTech. With extensive experience working closely with startups, we know how to help you with our WordPress development services.