[This is part of the Common WordPress Mistakes series to help bloggers, churches, ministries and nonprofits avoid common mistakes when creating a new website using the WordPress CMS.]
We’ve already covered six different mistakes and will look at two more, today. In hopes to make this series easier to digest, I’ve broken it down into digestible pieces. There’s nothing worse than information overload!
I hope these are helpful for those of you new to WordPress and good reminders to those of you who are familiar with WordPress. As I’ve said before, if you are a WordPress veteran, your comments are very much welcomed and for those of you with questions—fire away!
Common WordPress Mistakes
1. Editing Your Theme and Plugins without FTP Access
For most WordPress users, this isn’t a problem. The problem, however, usually has to do with not having this figured out before editing begins. There’s nothing like the feeling of crashing your site and not being able to login and fix it!
Before you edit even one line of code, make sure you’ve got your FTP (you should be using SFTP—technically speaking) figured out. That being said, it’s a good idea to have the files you are editing backed-up for easy recovery—a kind of undo. If you’ve got your FTP client setup and can easily find your theme and plugin files on your sever, you’re much less likely to feel panic if you crash your site.
You may have noticed that I refer to plugins and not just themes. Even if you are installing plugins from your WordPress Admin, you can crash your site. Talk about feeling powerless! How would you like to install a plugin in your WordPress Admin, have it crash, and not be able to go into your WordPress Admin and uninstall it? With your FTP access, you simple jump into your WordPress plugins directory and delete the suspected plugin.
There can be conflicts between plugins and themes at times, so having your FTP access established ahead of time is crucial!
2. Not Adding Analytics
You can’t measure success or failure without gauging it. Moreover, it’s important to understand your web traffic from both a marketing aspect as well as a technical aspect. When do you have the most web traffic? Can your server handle it?
I’ve know guys who have been told they need to upgrade their server, only to find in their website analytics that the traffic spike warranted no such thing. So why was their server running hot? Perhaps their theme was generating an error or a plugin was causing a problem; either way, you don’t know without analytics.
I suggest using Google Analytics. It’s free and relatively easy to add. Some WordPress themes, including all the StudioPress themes that use the Genesis framework, have an easy place to paste the analytics code into your website; while other themes will need you to manually insert the code (just make sure you’ve got that FTP access figured out).
Now, here are some other WordPress mistakes you’ll want to avoid.
[…] [Part 4] Editing Your Theme and Plugins without FTP Access & Not Adding Analytics […]