As WordPress enthusiasts, you know and we know that one of the things that make WordPress the most popular CMS is no doubt, its community!
Giving back to the WordPress community is essentially a big part of what we do and we always strive to go a step further. So we decided to gather the best WordPress advice from 10 WordPress influencers we love, and here we are, sharing all their words of wisdom with you.
Go ahead and enjoy the insights we got from WordPress experts like Troy Dean, Birgit Pauli-Haack, Mario Peshev, Joe Casabona, Ana Segota, and many more.
Top tips for beginners on WordPress
While some of these influencers would advise WordPress beginners to first decide exactly what they want, then start learning and experimenting, at the same time keeping up with the latest WordPress technologies and new features, others emphasize the importance of getting involved with the community.
Mario Peshev : “Get involved with the WordPress community! There’s a lot of noise surrounding the platform running 36% of the web. Community reps truly make a difference.”
Anariel Design: “This would be applicable to any industry you’re starting in. It is important to know what you want to do and why and then do it with confidence. Even if you don’t know all the ropes of the field (no one does), if you know your why and you’re confident about it, you’ll learn.”
WordPress mistakes
We’ve asked all 10 WordPress connaisseurs about the most common mistakes they’ve noticed throughout their WordPress journey. To sum up, here are the most frequent answers. The rest of them were quite similar.
- Modifying your theme via code without creating a Child Theme first.
- Using a theme that stores your content outside the WordPress standard fields. If your content is stored outside the standard fields and you decide to switch themes at some point, you will lose content, and you’ll then need to recreate the pages.
- Not having a clear content strategy and production plan for the website.
- Using bloated multipurpose premium themes with heavy page builders and sliders
- Purchasing a cheap, generic shared hosting account
- Blaming WordPress if things don’t run smoothly after #1 and #2 🙂
- Changing themes with every new project
- Using free versions of plugins and expecting great support from the devs
- Picking a theme and then trying to shove the client’s content into it – always start with the content first
- Unreliable hosting – a lot of times users choose a cheap solution, ignoring the importance of performance.
- No backups – beginners don’t know or don’t really care about backups. If something happens, they might end up with broken sites or missing content.
- Poor security – this one is common as well. Users are not aware of the importance of SSL, WordPress core and theme/plugin updates and other security measures.
Choosing a WordPress theme
Everyone seems to agree that the perfect theme must fully adjust to the content style and needs of the project or website concerned.
Anariel Design: “Often people got carried away by the bells and whistles of a theme only to discover, when it’s often too late, that the theme is an overkill for their project.
So, start with what your project requires and your vision of your website, then search for a theme whose demo and features come closest to it.”
Joe Casabona: “Determine early on if you want to customize everything, or if you want something more opinionated. That will determine the theme you get! Also, make sure it only controls the look and feel and doesn’t add functionality or rely too much on other plugins. If I need to install 6 other plugins to get the theme to work, that’s a red flag for me.”
Birgit Pauli-Haack: “It’s hard to consider a theme when you don’t have any content yet. Most people start out spending hours and hours setting up a fancy theme before they produce a steady stream of content. Content first, then formatting (= theme) follows content.”
Marie-Philippe Gill: “I wrote a complete blog post answering this question: https://girlknowstech.com/find-wordpress-theme/
One should make a list of important features you want from the theme, the support provided, the price, etc. The personalization options.”
The best hosting/CDN for WordPress blog beginners
While the most common choice was Siteground, preferred by Anariel Design, Marie-Philippe Gill, Alice Elliott, Joe Casabona, Mario Peshev and WPINDIGO for its cost-efficiency, reliability, and excellent support, let’s have a closer look at other preferences.
Birgit Pauli-Haack suggests Jetpack’s CDN features for WordPress beginners and managed hosting at WPEngine, Pressable, Cloudways, or Pantheon for businesses relying on their website as the main driver of their revenue and lead generation. Troy believes that WP Engine, Kinsta, Flywheel and DreamPress by DreamHost are all solid options.
Tran Ngoc Tuan Anh considers HawkHost the best hosting solution for WordPress beginners and CloudFlare, the best (and free) CDN choice.
Sakthi Kumaran highly recommends GreenGeeks or ChemiCloud hosting as affordable choices for beginners.
Besides Siteground, Joe Casabona also values Nexcess for its compelling plans of less than $20/month.
Mario Peshev would go for NitroPack as a fully-fledged SaaS performance with an integrated CDN.
Basics to consider for website protection
WordFence appears to be highly regarded by WPINDIGO, Ana Segota, Marie-Philippe Gill and Troy Dean as the best choice for a security plugin.
WPINDIGO: “Make sure you have SSL on your site and regular backups. Next, use a security plugin like Wordfence, iThemes, VaultPress, etc. Always update your themes/plugins and WordPress core. Use plugins and themes from reliable providers.”
Joe Casabona: “A security plugin like iThemes Security Pro will go a long way to help you too. Finally, make sure you’re on the minimum recommended version of PHP. Good hosting will help with that.”
Sakthi Kumaran and Nirmala : “Getting a high-performance, managed hosting is the best way to protect the WordPress website. If needed, a good security plugin like “Malcare” can be used for extra protection.”
Tran Ngoc Tuan Anh: “Switch to a VPS if you can. Then you have full control to protect your website. It’s hard to protect well on a shared host.”
WordPress tools to make a developer’s life easier
We’ve gathered quite a wide range of such tools for you to consider:
Troy Dean: Staging environments, Local by Flywheel, All in One Migration Plugin
Tran Ngoc Tuan Anh: A good IDE/Editor like PHPStorm or VSCode, a good custom fields framework like MetaBox.io, a good page builder plugin like Beaver Builder
- DesktopServer – I love it! it is the best tool to create multiple local WordPress websites.
- Duplicator – An excellent tool to move & backup the WordPress sites
- Buddy Works – Helpful CD (Continuous Deployment) tool to integrate GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket with cloud sharing platforms
Anariel Design: “A good code editor, we use Visual Studio Code, reliable local server (e.g. Local) and a good pair of glasses:).”
Joe Casabona: “Query Monitor is a good one. It’s a plugin that you should only install on dev sites, but it gives you a good picture of what’s happening under the hood while your WordPress site is running. WP-CLI of-course is fantastic, and Local by Flywheel for a local development environment. As a bonus, any code editor that can autocomplete WordPress functions. I’m a big fan of VS Code.”
- VVV for development environment
- Query Monitor for debugging database queries
- WP-CLI for pretty much everything else 🙂
Giving back to the WordPress community
Finally, we asked everyone about the importance of giving back to the WordPress community and if there’s a secret to becoming a top WordPress influencer. Sure enough, these two seem to be linked.
Alice Elliott: “It’s pointless coping on your own. Not only is it lonely, how else will you learn about the latest developments, be the first to try new things, make good working relationships with like-minded people within your own niche, and have a ready and waiting readership and advocacy to help promote your blog or website? And if you can move this onto social media, you’ll be developing your new friendships even further.”
Joe Casabona: “Some of my best friends are people I met through WordPress. I got my first agency job because of the community, and I’m successfully navigating self-employment because of the community. If you’re using WordPress, one of the best things you can do is get involved in the community.”
Sakthi Kumaran: “Consistency matters a lot! Moreover, it is mandatory to stay updated with the recent WordPress & SEO trends. Self-learning strategy and SEO experiments will help to become a top WordPress influencer.”
Now that you know some of the best WordPress influencers’ views on everything WordPress, it’s your turn to share your thoughts. What else would you add?
About the WordPress Experts:
Troy Dean
Troy Dean helps creative entrepreneurs build awesome online empires. WP Elevation and Video User Manuals are two of his projects.
Birgit Pauli-Haack
Birgit Pauli-Haack is the publisher of Gutenberg Times, a site with news around WordPress block editor and beyond. Birgit hosts regular Gutenberg Live Q & A on YouTube and co-hosts the podcast Gutenberg Changelog with Mark Uraine.
Mario Peshev
Mario Peshev is the CEO of DevriX and Growth Shuttle, and the lead advisor behind Sales CRM and SaaS BPM, WordPress-driven SaaS solutions. Peshev has been heavily involved with the WordPress community since 2008 and contributing to the WordPress Core since version 3.7. Currently, he spends most of his time with SMEs and high-scale publishers as DevriX retainer partners and building the new portfolio of products.
Joe Casabona
Joe Casabona is a college professor, author, course developer, and podcaster. He also has his Master’s Degree in Software Engineering. Joe started freelancing in 2002 and has been a teacher at the college level for over 10 years. His passion in both areas drove him to create courses for The University of Scranton, LinkedIn Learning, and his own community of business owners. He writes books and creates courses about HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress, and more.
Ana Segota/ Anariel Design
Anariel Design is an online web design agency that specializes in developing premium niche WordPress themes. All our themes are built combining unique and fresh design ideas with simplicity and user-friendliness. We believe that most people need simple yet effective solutions for their online presence. This very philosophy is built into everything we do. Besides putting a lot of time and heart into our designs we put as much effort supporting our themes and giving our support human and friendly touch.
WPINDIGO
WPINDIGO provides useful guides and articles for WordPress users and web enthusiasts.
Alice Elliott
Alice Elliott, aka Fairy Blog Mother, is an award winning WordPress influencer who specialises in helping beginner bloggers by “explaining things really simply”. She is also the founder of The Commenting Club, a safe haven to advocate the resurrection of kind commenting in blogs and on social media.
Marie-Philippe Gill
Founder of girlknowstech.com, Marie-Philippe Gill is a student in software engineering who loves to write blog posts about tech, women in STEM and blogging tips.
Tran Ngoc Tuan Anh
Anh Tran (commonly known as Rilwis) is a WordPress developer with more than 12 years of experience. He’s the founder of the Meta Box, a custom fields plugin for WordPress with more than 400.000 active installs. He also runs a premium theme shop at GretaThemes.com and a digital agency at eLightUp.com.
Anh and his team have been working with world-wide enterprises from the US, Australia, EU, and Vietnam. They consult, make digital strategies and build websites for SMEs, non-profit organizations and governments.
Anh is passionate about building digital products on WordPress. He loves coding, writing and sharing with people.
Sakthi, a thoughtful guy who specializes in WordPress Setup & Design and Nirmala, a professional blogger who provides useful SEO & WordPress content for budding bloggers are the two founders of WPGlossy.
