5 Things you Need to Know BEFORE Using 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 five things you need to know before creating your WordPress website. This video is sponsored
by TrueName Domains. Find the perfect domain for your brand at the link in the description below. 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 allow 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 rights to use that branding. So should you use wordpress.com? Probably not in most cases. I have an entire video on wordpress.com versus wordpress.org so you can understand all the intricacies and what you need to know on
the topic, 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 anyone of those web hosts.
I have lots of videos comparing the best web hosting for you. 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. The third thing you need to
know before using WordPress is that you need a security plugin. You might be saying, "Christian, 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, "Christian,
I'm just some local bakery," or "I just do lawn care in my city. Nobody's gonna 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
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for sponsoring this video. 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, this means that 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 help community
on the wordpress.org website, and there's 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 that you can get guaranteed help. You're just gonna have to post
to the WordPress community and sort of hope for the best. 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. So those are five things you need to know before using 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. When you are building your website, make sure to take advantage of
50% off your TrueName domain at the link in the description below. If you like this video, definitely check out my
WordPress web hosting comparison.
With that said, I'll
catch you guys next time..
