WordPress help: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid on Your Website

Here at Wibble, we have been carrying out award-winning web design and web development since 2013 and have vast experience in high-end specialist WordPress development, so we’ve seen our fair share of WordPress website mistakes over the years. From ignoring security vulnerabilities to poor website design, these mistakes can negatively impact your website’s performance, security and user experience.

Let’s go over some common mistakes that other web design studios make when designing, developing and maintaining their websites, and how to avoid these to ensure that your WordPress website is set up for success.

Poor web design

A poorly designed website can lead to high bounce rates and lost sales. Common website design mistakes include a cluttered layout, poor font choices, bad user experience and a confusing navigation. By investing in a well designed website, this can help generate higher returns on marketing investments, aid in user retention, and boost your search engine rankings.

At Wibble, we design websites that are tailored to your business needs and goals. As part of our web design and development process, we perform competitive research to discover how we can make your website stand out from your competition. We focus on how the website functions, from how users will navigate through the site, to how fast pages load, all the way to how your website will look and work across various devices. We can help you implement a responsive, modern and user-friendly website that engages your visitors and drives conversions.

Pre-built WordPress Themes

While pre-built themes can be a great starting point for your website, a ‘one size fits all’ solution can be problematic. Pre-built themes don’t allow much customisation to fit your brand, which can negatively impact your website’s SEO as they are typically not tailored to your business. As well as this, they are often bloated with unnecessary features, which can slow down your website and hurt its performance. Our web project manager, Shane, wrote a blog on the differences between pre-built themes and custom design and built sites: Explained: Custom Built Themes vs. Pre-Built Themes in WordPress.

This is why, at Wibble, we custom build bespoke WordPress themes that are tailored to your unique business identity, needs and goals. This ensures that your website is fast, efficient, optimised for mobile success and custom to you.

Outdated WordPress Versions and Plugins

Keeping the version of WordPress and plugins up-to-date is essential for maintaining your website’s security and website functionality. Failing to update these can lead to security vulnerabilities and compatibility issues. It’s important to update WordPress and plugins regularly to ensure that you are using the latest security patches and bug fixes. It’s also vital to test your website thoroughly after each update to ensure that everything is working properly.

Our Wibble Support Package covers WordPress core updates, plugin updates, theme updates as well as other updates on a server management level. We have a team of experienced and dedicated support agents who update and then manually check through your website to make sure nothing has been negatively affected by the updates. We also ensure to notify you when we make updates to also give you an opportunity to check over your site.

On top of this, we have an automated vulnerability scanner which scans each site every 24 hours to check for core, theme or plugin vulnerabilities against a global vulnerability database. If we are alerted to any vulnerabilities, we respond to this by immediately fixing, testing and then continuing to monitor the site afterwards. Through these regular updates and testing, we can help ensure that your website is always running smoothly. Having a dedicated web support team looking after your WordPress website is a huge benefit to you – our Wibble Support Package offers “Peace of Mind by Design“.

The process Wibble follows to manage the hundreds of WordPress sites under our control has been documented in our blog: “Golden Gate Bridge Approach” – Wibble’s take on WordPress management.

No Backups

Failing to back up your website regularly can lead to lost data and significant downtime in the event of a security breach or any other issue. It’s crucial to have a backup strategy in place so that you can quickly restore your website in the event of an emergency.

As part of our Wibble Support Package, we have automated regular backups of each site running daily. This means that in the event that something goes wrong, we are able to quickly recover a previous backup of your site and restore it immediately to ensure minimal downtime. We regularly test our backups to ensure they are functioning and usable and we have an alert system in place should a backup fail for any reason. Finding out a backup system isn’t working when you need an urgent backup would be a catastrophe.

Ignoring SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimisation is critical for driving traffic and conversions on your website. Neglecting SEO best practices and failing to optimise your site can do more harm to your site’s ranking.

Fortunately, we have experience developing many sites with technical SEO as a fundamental part of the web design process, and we do this by making sure to use relevant keywords in content and metadata, optimising your site’s performance on mobile devices and ensuring your site is fast, accessible and user-friendly. We work with you to identify any specific requirements we can include to help us optimise your site to improve your website ranking in search engine results and attract more visitors.

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By avoiding these common mistakes and following best practices, you can ensure that your WordPress website is tailored to your business and is optimised for conversion.

Wibble are an award-winning web design and development studio based in Belfast in Northern Ireland and we offer a range of web design services to help you avoid these mistakes and achieve your business goals, including web design and web development, technical SEO, security audits, website maintenance, backup and support. If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you optimise your WordPress website for success, get in touch or go to our start a web design project section.