It takes no effort to get carried away after finally finishing your WordPress content post. Oftentimes you may even find your twitchy index finger instinctively clicking the “Publish” button soon after you’ve placed the final period in the content. Naturally, uploading a WordPress blog post like that has many dire consequences for your blog, especially if done consistently.

In fact, there’s a moderately long list of things you need to have done before uploading a WordPress blog post. Some of them are essential while others can be skipped safely. However, instead of discussing those, we’re here to give you a list of the wrong things. It’s shorter, meaning easier to remember and to follow.

These are the critical and ubiquitous mistakes most bloggers make before uploading a WordPress blog post. Make sure you avoid these like the plague, otherwise your content will surely suffer.

Poor image formatting

Images are a huge part of any written content since they help serve as icebreakers and they also serve to increase the interest of the readers. Still, a poorly formatted image is worse than a wall of text in terms of visuals. Make sure to always align the images with the text and size them down (never up) so they don’t take an invasive amount of space.

You don’t even have to do this outside of WordPress as the website has a built-in image resizer tool (cropping is a different story, though). Additionally, images can help increase your SEO. The right title or the right alternate text containing the keywords can make your images pop up when someone searches for that keyword. In turn, it could lead to your website.

Unchecked links

Apart from ensuring that you have both internal and external links in your written content for references and promotion of older content, you’ll also want to check the credibility or authority of these links. Such a practice is best done for external links since you probably already know how much domain authority your blog has. If not, you can check here.

The reasoning for this is that you don’t want to link to websites with poor domain authority. Doing so can potentially lower your domain authority as well since you’re basically spreading content from poor authority websites. For most mainstream and recognizable websites, this is shouldn’t be much of a concern, most of them are high-authority. Just be wary of linking to sites with spam, pornographic, or other questionable content.

Forgetting backups

We could not iterate this enough regardless of whether you’re a beginner or a veteran WordPress user. No matter how “infallible” your backup plugin is for your website, things can still go awry and you might lose content stored on the server or somewhere else. When that happens the only chance you have at restoring it is through an actual backup on your hard drive.

Once the content has been perfectly polished for your website, being overconfident about the reliability of your backup plugin could be your undoing if you don’t back it up on your hard drive. All that hard work would go to waste if something bad happens on the servers. In any case, backing up manually on your hard drive is as easy as copying and pasting. To preserve formatting, you can even do this for the HTML version.

RELATED: These Nightmare Stories Will Remind You How Important It Is To Backup Your Blog

Wrong use of categories and tags

For many WordPress beginners, categories and tags can be confusing. This is doubly worse if your blog is just new and you’re just setting out to add some categories and tags. Often, adding too many categories for the blog and designating it to your content is not very conducive for the SEO and the site structure mainly because you might create overlapping categories.

This can be bad for keywords– saturation and keyword cannibalization can happen. Meanwhile, the same can be said for tags; they make for easier content searching and indexing on your website for your readers. Using too many tags is a bit overkill, the usual two to three tags should do.

Not optimizing your headline

Next to the featured image, the headline is the most visible element of content to the audience. As such, you’ll have to be more careful and meticulous with it than necessary. You’ll even have to be creative with it at times, balancing the SEO and the conciseness of the headline.

It is best to also use headlines which do not end in the SEO keyword for better search engine results and better impact on the readers. Once they immediately know what the content is about, they’ll be more inclined to read it. Do stay away from clickbait as it is generally frowned upon by readers. All in all, the headline can easily kill a content’s viewership depending on how you polish it.

Not proofreading

To a certain extent, we are all guilty of this, especially for writers. Uploading a WordPress blog post without proofreading is one of the most common mistakes you can commit in a blog. While it has little to no effect on SEO, it shows a lack of concern for your readers and for your website’s quality control.

Sure, you can let machines do the work for you; there are plenty of proofing tools available. However, you don’t want to rely on them too much for grammar– this can affect your writing in the long run. At most, you should be using them only to correct typographical or spelling errors. For best results, read your written content out loud. It’s easier to detect writing errors this way.

Poor content formatting

Last but not least is another common mistake that online writing beginners tend to practice out of their lack of adjustment: lack of content formatting. Long paragraphs, long sentences, poor image-to-text ratio, those are just some examples. You’ll mostly be losing readability if you don’t address those.

Not using headings or subheadings for long-form (or even longer short form) content not only denies content readability but also better SEO. That’s because headings and subheadings are also a proven way to get better SEO, especially if they contain keywords. Plus, your readers will thank you for them.

Thankfully, around half of these problems can be monitored better by using a Yoast SEO and readability plugin. It’s up to you if you want to make good use of that free resource. In a sense, avoiding these mistakes before uploading a WordPress blog post is another way to improve your writing and your content. It’s a win-win situation for both you and your audience.

RELATED: Most Common SEO Mistakes Bloggers Make

Recommend：
Summits set epoch-making milestone in history of China-Arab ties
In the face of COVID-19 pandemic, China and Arab countries have
15 Macao residents qualify as candidates for deputies to nationa
Study finds genetic solution to pre-harvest sprouting in rice, w
Bodybuilders dying as coaches, judges encourage extreme measures
Malta's Marsaskala, China's Dujiangyan sign sister city agreemen
U.S. mortgage applications continue slide amid surging interest
Russian, UAE presidents discuss bilateral cooperation over phone
Hate crimes in U.S. Los Angeles County rise to highest level sin
Chinese mainland reports 4,031 new local confirmed COVID-19 case