Understanding WordPress: What Beginners Should and Should Not Do

Now as you have quite understood WordPress by self-learning and also by reading my other two posts that I have released for this series of Understanding WordPress – “Understanding WordPress’s Internal Structure” and “How to Make WordPress Store a Success”, it’s high time I moved to something more specific and useful to WordPress beginners!

If you ever feel confused as what are the right or wrong things to do when it comes to WordPress, well congrats my friends, you are in the right place! As once a beginner myself, I know how difficult it is to memorize all the rules and the warnings, but believe me, it will get better with time, especially when you have successfully grasped the core ones. Speaking of those “core ones”, there is no reason for me not to write a collection of what starters should remember to do and not to do when learning how to use WordPress. What I will provide you right down below are heartfelt experiences gathered from many WordPress experts or advanced users I know, so don’t worry whether they will work well for you or not, because I’m sure they will.

When using WordPress, please remember to:

• Do Enhance WordPress’s Security
• Do Build a New Database User for the WordPress Database
• Do Make Use of Plugins
• Do Promote Your WordPress Site on Social Media

Along with those should-do activities, pay attention to these points:

• Don’t Use Copyrighted Data
• Don’t Root for Bad Hosting
• Don’t Abuse Categories
• Don’t Capitalize Everything

To see clearly what I mean, please carry on reading!

Let us start off with the 4 DO’s, shall we?

1. Do Enhance WordPress’s Security

Many people make the mistake of letting themselves become victims of hacking or website crashing while they could have totally avoided it, so, do not be one! When it comes to protecting your beloved WordPress website, do not ever hesitate, or else you will regret it. Once your website crashes without being backed up and all your data is gone, there will be nothing you can do about it. So how can you prepare for that? The answer is simple: a backup plugin. A good backup plugin will free you from the hard work of securing your website on your own by doing all the tasks itself. So if you are considering a plugin to use, take a double look at either BackupBuddy or VaultPress.

Furthermore, you can other steps to protect the Admin area by creating a strong and complicated password or updating WordPress on a regular basis, etc.

2. Do Build a New Database User for the WordPress Database

In case you do not know it yet, WordPress requires users to establish a database to save posts and content in general. What is important is that this database can only be gained access to by a database user with password. Subsequently, when you have to use this database for some other tasks and change the password, the website of yours is very much likely to crash. Well, you do not wish to see it happen, do you?

That’s why I highly advise you to create a new database when needed instead of using the already existing one. It will not take much time, but it can definitely save your from seeing your website broken!

3. Do Make Use of Plugins

You have done some observation and seen something unusually fantastic on a WordPress website and wonder why you cannot find any feature like that on your own web, why is that? Well, in this very case, I suspect that feature was created by a plugin or a widget. There are many wonderful plugins available on the market, but I believe you should only install the most essential, for example:

• A cache plugin like W3 Total Cache can help your WordPress website load faster as well as minimizing chances of crashing.
• A SEO plugin will take care of SEO practice to attract new visitors, in this respect, Yoast SEO sounds just great.
• Spamming will not be an issue anymore with Askimet.

Those are some of the most wildly used plugins on WordPress nowadays. Amazing as they are, remember to uninstall them if you no longer need them, or else they will create serious security holes in your site!

4. Do Promote Your WordPress Site on Social Media

Believe me or not, a very large number of visitors (which is a very large amount of traffic) of a given website comes from its social media channels. While search engines spend time indexing your website and ranking it on search results, you can totally use that time to promote your site elsewhere. Create accounts for your website on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., and post on them a link leading to your newly released article when you publish one. Gradually, this practice will produce fruitful results.

Remember to interact with your followers and fans to keep them interested in your website too, or else they might get bored of your ignorance!

See, understanding WordPress is not so hard, yes? Just remember these 4 DON’Ts below and you will complete this course:

1. Don’t Use Copyrighted Data

This is what you really should know: Things that are protected under the copyright laws cannot be used without owners’ permissions and credit to them. These so-called protected properties include text, images and videos, among others. Messing with copyrighted data can lead you to deep troubles and some times, if unlucky, even lawsuits for yourself or your company.

In many cases, you only need to put a credit or simply link back to the original piece so as to use a copyrighted material, but so long as they do not say clearly their policies, just don’t touch it at all!

2. Don’t Root for Bad Hosting

No offence, but bad hosting is usually the cheap ones, or the ones you buy from unspecialized companies. Do not get me wrong here, because a cheap hosting can always be a good one if it comes from a great provider. I just simply do not encourage you to take the risk of buying something that turns out to be not as good as expected. For example, do not ever buy hosting from a brand that has only been famous for domain service. Take my advice kindly if you do not fancy server time-out rate or even the cancellation process!

SiteGround, HostGator and BlueHost are some brand names you can trust in this matter of hosting services, as far as I am concerned.

3. Don’t Abuse Categories

Categories are lovely navigational elements! They help restructure your WordPress website and makes navigation become as easy as possible, but mark my words: they may be useless if not used properly! For the majority of your posts, only use one and just one category. If you think there are several categories that match well with your article, you might want to reconsider your website’s structure – that is my most sincere advice!

One more thing, do not use too many categories and make visitors dizzy with them, only go for the most necessary ones!

4. Don’t Capitalize Everything

How do you feel looking at an article with its titled ALL CAPITALIZED LIKE THIS? Annoying, right? So, do your visitors a favor and please do not capitalize everything in your post titles. Only use capitalized letters for nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and subordinating conjunctions (because, since, as, etc.), and don’t capitalize such components as articles (a, an, the), coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, etc.) and prepositions (on, in, at, etc.). Moreover, do not EVER capitalize any URLs element, because it will destroy your website’s traffic.

Conclusion

So those are some very fundamental do’s and don’ts for WordPress beginners, not so hard to understand and remember, isn’t it? Though it is not anything like those complicated pieces of knowledge for experienced users, just some simple tips, but I really hope it is useful for you and your WordPress self-studying! Understanding WordPress to such an extent is not something out of reach after all, am I right?

If you have any questions or other tips you want to share with use, don’t hesitate to comment right below!