RTatW is approaching its 5th birthday and looking back, I thought I should share some of the worst mistakes I made when I started it. So here is a piece on the 5 big mistakes I made when starting my blog – A “gift” for RTatW 5th birthday!
You know I’m not a list type of Gal when it comes to blogging, but in this case it seemed appropriate!
With regards to these mistakes, why do I consider them to be the worst ones? Because I’m still struggling to correct some of them! Yep! These mistakes have been for me, sooo time consuming to correct, that I wish I had known better from the start.
Let’s dive!
Mistake #1: Not learning all the functionalities of WordPress
I installed WordPress.org on my web host and chose my theme. Then I created my home page and various posts and everything seemed to work great… I truly felt like a champion!
Aaahhh silly me….
Here I’ll take the example of my home page to demonstrate how bad things, actually were.
In my dashboard, my home page looked like this:
Yes a complete blank space!
Why? Clearly if you visit my home page, you’ll see that it’s far from blank! So how can this be?
This is because my home page is filled with widgets. Widgets to display a slider, featured posts, images, call to action, a footer side bar… These are all configured in the widget section of WordPress dashboard so they do not appear on the page display.
This means my home page is blank. 0 words, 0 image. The complete void!
And you know what Google and other search engines do not like? You guessed right: they don’t like the void! Amongst other things!
Back then I didn’t even think of filling up the snippet preview, adding focus keywords or adding a featured image. Nada, I left this mysterious void alone. 😉
This isn’t a technical piece on how to fix my mistake so I won’t go into details on how I fixed them. This is a piece where I’m highlighting such mistakes so you can avoid them.
The issues with my home page is just an example. The take is that you’ve got to study the tools you’re going to be using. Don’t just read articles on how to use this or this. Do read some of ‘how to’ but also go to the source and read the user manual! For WordPress.org for example, study the codex!
Mistake #2: Not naming my pictures properly
Pictures are an important feature of any website. Even Reddit now and that probably means something!
I knew this from the start. I always wanted to add a lot of pictures to my articles to make them very visual. That was a plan from the start.
For some unknown reasons, despite knowing how important pictures are, I completely messed up!
You see, I went as far as uploading pictures named IMG90213.JPG! Yes I did! I didn’t remember I did, but I checked and I can’t believe it myself. I knew better, even when I started, so why??
Don’t do this! Give a proper name to your pictures!
Anyway, later, there was some progress as I gave proper titles to my pictures. You know, titles on my computer, before loading such pictures.
Still I wasn’t doing it properly and now I’m paying the price of such mistake. I’m currently in the process of going back on all my images and doing it right. It is so time consuming, so frustrating and so boring, you wouldn’t believe it!
Just don’t do the same mistake!
Give relevant titles to your pictures before uploading them. Once uploaded, do fill up the Alt Text box, caption and even the description box. WordPress is providing those for good reasons!
Do this before you have thousands of improperly named pictures in your online library and you end up spending your evenings renaming them, like I am!
Remember you are not helping yourself in not doing so properly. Most importantly, you are not helping your readers either.
Mistake #3: Not filing up the excerpt – not using the snippet
When I started RTatW on WordPress.com, I thought the “Read more” tag was cool!😭 😱 🤣 To this day, I don’t know if I should cry about it, be scared or roll on the floor of laughter.
This “Read more” tag WordPress feature, meant I thought I didn’t need to fill up the Excerpt box. Lazy bunny I was!
Please, please, pretty please don’t do that! Install Yoast SEO, fill up the snippet preview and the WordPress preview.
I know it’s hard sometimes. I still struggle with that from time to time and when I don’t struggle and go back to what I wrote, I often think to myself: WTF!?!
Mistake #4: Not choosing your blog categories and tags wisely
That was another super time consuming mistake I made. When I started RTatW, I didn’t think of my categories and tags and added them along the way, whenever inspiration stroke… But inspiration wasn’t very wise and I ended up with a mismatch of gibberish, overlapping nonsense which didn’t fit together.
It took me forever to straiten things up (although still not quite what I wanted). This created broken links and rerouting errors which Google did not appreciate.
So, again, don’t do that!
Think of your categories before you post your first article. Add new ones wisely. Same thing for your tags, really.
This will benefit your readers as they will more easily find content they appreciate.
Mistake #5: Not getting a ssl certificate
An SSL certificate is a little data file that enable your site to be encrypted i.e. more secured for your readers. A website with a SSL certificate has a little padlock in front of its name. Clicking on the link of a website without a SSL might get you on a red screenshot saying something like: DANGER!
It’s not necessarily dangerous to get on a website without a SSL Certificate, like it might not be that safe to get on a website that has one. However, Google has, a few months back, hinted that website with an SSL certificate might get better visibility than the ones without.
At that point, everyone, including me, got a SSL certificate! OK, almost everyone.
SSL certificates are not new and since I got one, I wondered, why didn’t I get one before! WHY?! Well I don’t have an answer to this as there isn’t any particular reason. But not getting one is something I regret almost everyday.
Why, you may ask?
Because now to access RTatW, you go to https://www.roadtripsaroundtheworld.com when before you went to http://www.roadtripsaroundtheworld.com
This doesn’t seem like a major change. Just a little extra s. And if you type http://… you are automatically redirected to https://… anyway.
So again you may ask: why the fuss?!
Because of all the internal linking going on! Those links, included in all my various articles, are not being updated automatically. They are being redirected automatically but not updated. And that takes quite a bit of time to manually update, like a huge amount of time.
So yeah, redirects? Not good! Get a SSL certificate right away!
Bonus Mistakes #6 to #1,000?
I’m kidding I’m not going to list the 1,000 mistakes I made, that would be too long!
Here is a list of 10 extra mistakes I made and which you may want to avoid:
- Starting on WordPress.com instead of WordPress.org
- Not installing Yoast SEO right away
- Not getting an automatic back up right away! (oh my God the stress caused by this!)
- Using non reliable plugins – plugins do die and take you down with them
- Not creating a sitemap right away
- Not creating Pinterest friendly images for all my articles
- Hiding the Pinterest friendly images I created! Don’t even ask…
- Spelling mistakes… seriously!
- Being an anti-social human being. I can’t help it
- Reading too many of the same ‘how to’ instead of doing
If you want more infos on How to create a website, you can check my 4 part series, where I share with you all my tips on how to do it. Those tips are a bit different than the ones you can commonly find out there.
How to create a Website – Part 1: choose your name wisely
How to create a Website – Part 2: Design
How to create a Website: part 3 – Set up
How to create a Website: Part 4 – Content creation
And you can find even more resources in my UGRADE Series. I’ll admit it’s a work in progress but there are some pretty good stuff in there already!
And there are smurfs! 😳🤔
PIN THIS FOR LATER
