Top 5 Things to keep in mind before beginning your WordPress journey

WordPress is a powerful and popular platform for creating websites, with over 40% of all websites on the internet using it. However, getting started with WordPress can be overwhelming for beginners. With so many options and features, it’s easy to get lost in the process. To help you get started with WordPress, we’ve put together a list of 5 Things you should know before getting started with WordPress. Whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or simply looking to create a website, these tips will help you get the most out of WordPress and create a successful online presence. From choosing the right hosting provider to selecting the right theme, this article will provide you with the knowledge of 5 things you should know before getting started with WordPress.

If you’re considering WordPress to build your website, you may not be aware of some of the caveats you need to know before getting started. Here are 5 things you should know before getting started with WordPress

WordPress.com vs WordPress.org

The first thing you need to know before using WordPress is the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org. So open Google and type in WordPress. Chances are, wordpress.com ranked at the top. You may have clicked it and thought, “Oh yeah, this is WordPress. I just create an account here, build my WordPress website and I’m good to go.” And that’s valid.  You could build your WordPress site through wordpress.com, but wordpress.com is not actually WordPress. See, notice that wordpress.com says WordPress Hosting in the title. wordpress.com is a WordPress host. They’re a company that will run WordPress on a web server and allows you to use it. 

So there are hosts similar to GoDaddy or Namecheap or DreamHost or Bluehost. wordpress.com just happens to be run by the same team that manages the wordpress.org project. wordpress.org or WordPress is an open-source website builder that’s free to use. Meaning it can be installed on any web host, but wordpress.com looks all official because it happens to be run by the team who manages wordpress.org and they have the rights to use that branding. 

So should you use wordpress.com Probably not in most cases, but for most people, I recommend you stay away from wordpress.com for various reasons, stick to using wordpress.org and install it on web hosting from DreamHost or Namecheap or any one of those web hosts. I have lots of articles comparing the best web hosting for you. Check our site properly, you will see it. 

Not Drag and Drop

The second thing you need to know before using WordPress is that it’s not a drag-and-drop platform. Well, not really. There are third-party page builder plugins you can install that give WordPress powerful drag-and-drop functionality. These would be plugins like Divi, Elementor, and WPBakery. These are very commonly used plugins and chances are when someone talks about building a WordPress website, they’re using a page builder like this, but they typically don’t really mention it by name. 

Now in recent years, WordPress has started to introduce a sort of drag-and-drop builder called Gutenberg, that’s a page builder that comes with WordPress. However, it’s just not powerful enough yet to replace Elementor or Divi or WPBakery in most cases. 

So if you install WordPress and you don’t use a page builder plugin, you may be frustrated by the limitations of building pages and creating posts, and you may be confused at why it’s maybe not as easy as you thought to drag and drop elements onto the page. 

Security Plugin

The third thing you need to know before using WordPress is that you need a security plugin. You might be saying, ” what do you mean? Doesn’t WordPress have a username and password?” And the answer is, yes, but also your WordPress site is going to get targeted by hackers, they’re gonna try to spam your login page and get into your WordPress site. You may be saying, ” I’m just some local bakery,” or “I just do lawn care in my city. Nobody’s going to try and target my business and get into my website.”

That is wrong. If you’re on WordPress, you’re at high risk. Why? Because for hackers it’s not personal. They don’t give a rip that you’re a lawn care business. They don’t care that all you are is a local bakery. Hackers want to get into WordPress websites because they’re easy to exploit, they’re universal attacks that work on WordPress sites that don’t have security plugins and once they get into your WordPress website, they’re not trying to do anything personal against your business. They’re after your WordPress site to get access to your web hosting. 

Once they get in, they’re gonna do things like put up spam pages on your site and include those links in emails. You know when you click a link and it goes to those pages saying your computer was hacked and you need to call this 1-800 number, and it’s all a scam? Those pages are hosted on web hosting somewhere. And they’re hosted on web hosting accounts of vulnerable individuals who had a WordPress site and they didn’t protect it properly.

So I highly recommend the Wordfence plugin. It’s 100% free to use and has a built-in firewall that will block repeated logging attempts. It will also allow you to enable two-factor authentication on your website.  So that way, if someone did guess your password, they would still need that temporary 2FA code to finish logging in. 

So as you can see, it’s critical to protect your WordPress website. It’s also important to secure your online branding. That’s where the sponsor of today’s video comes in,

No Official Support

And now let’s get into the fourth thing you need to know before using WordPress. And that’s the fact that there is no official WordPress support. Now, since WordPress is an open-source project, you’re not paying to use it.  And as a result, there’s no support team that’s there all the time to help you. There is no email or phone number or chat to contact WordPress for help. Now, there is a helpful community on the wordpress.org website, and there are a lot of highly-trained individuals, some of which work very closely with WordPress, who are hanging out on the forums in the community, and they’re around to answer questions.

So it’s not like there’s zero help or support available with WordPress, but there’s no official support or central place where you can get guaranteed help. You’ll just have to post to the WordPress community and hope for the best.

Daily Backups

And the fifth thing you need to know before using WordPress is that backups matter. I cannot stress this enough. You wanna find WordPress hosting that’s gonna give you automatic daily backups, if not daily, at least weekly. 

But why are backups so important? Well, earlier we talked about the importance of a security plugin with WordPress and backups are sort of part of that. If your site ever were to get compromised, even if you’re using a security plugin, having daily automated backups means you can roll your site back to the night before when the site was compromised and everything is back to normal.

You never wanna be in a position where your WordPress website gets compromised and you have no backup to restore to. Trust me on this, you do not wanna have to remember to take a backup manually. You want a web host or a solution that’s going to automate WordPress backups every night, so that way it’s always there if the worst were to happen. I recommend using web hosting that does this for you. Some hosts that are great with backups include DreamHost and Cloudways. I have an entire WordPress-hosting guide you can refer to that will help you find a solution with automatic backups. Check it out in this blog.

Conclusion

So those are 5 Things you should know before getting started with wordpress. There’s no reason to be intimidated by WordPress and knowing these five things, you can go in much more educated and ready to learn and figure out how to build your first website. If you like this article, definitely check out this blog for WordPress web hosting comparison. With that said, I’ll catch you guys next time.

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