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The most common mistakes in website design

Errors and mistakes in website design and coding are inevitable that any website designer may make. These mistakes are mentioned below in 3 parts: coding, design, and SEO.

Programming errors

Mistakes that cause website overload include:

 

1- Plugins and templates problems

Plugins and templates are great. They can help you add anything to your website without hiring a developer or coding yourself. However, when you use weak and vulnerable codes, it can be a problem for your website.

Even when you have time to check, install, and remove all of them, this can be a problem because you will waste time and the website’s bandwidth.

To resolve these issues, do the following.

2- Use only the plugins you need.

If you install plugins or templates on the website just for testing and are not satisfied with them, get rid of them. If you feel they may be needed, you can keep the zip file somewhere.

Note: If you delete a plugin or a template, read its readme file first. Some have their own cleaning procedures.

3- Only use templates and plugins with valid and reliable addresses and clean and optimized code.

There are tons of worthless plugins and templates out there. They are developed by amateurs or sloppy people. They do not even have any support, are not updated, and are not synchronized with new versions of WordPress. Also, some of them are made for misuse and malicious purposes.

4- Find plugins that consume a lot of resources.

The tool you use to test website speed can identify frequently used plugins. Test your website with and without these plugins. If the loading speed increases after disabling a plugin, then you have found a problematic plugin. If you can find a replacement, unzip it and install it.

Also, for this case, there is a plugin that you can use to identify weak plugins: Query Monitor.

5- Have inefficient scripts with wrong coding

Computer code is a set of machine instructions that are executed over and over again to get the same expected results. Generally, for web hosting, there is a set of instructions in a programming language like PHP. If the scripts on your website are efficiently and custom-coded, they should usually have an execution time of under a second.

You are suggested to read our article to learn about coding techniques and what coding is.

All websites behave differently in terms of memory usage, like some scripts that have optimizations and extensions inside them, such as the possibility of caching in Joomla. Depending on the level of traffic your site receives, even an active plugin or script that is resource-intensive or poorly coded can put a huge strain on server resources.

Therefore, it is better to limit the number of modules, extensions, and plugins you use and delete those that are no longer active. An outdated and unupdated script/plugin/module will often fuel the problem of resource abuse, so all installed scripts, including any third-party add-ons, should be updated. Developers should also constantly improve their scripts and clean up security holes to increase efficiency.

Despite these measures, if resource usage issues persist, the suspect script should be isolated and resolved by resetting, disabling, or replacing it with a working script. Implementing entire pages in PHP in XAMPP, WAMP, and EasyPHP environments can display special scripts or separate functions that take up most of the time. It is possible to identify the problematic plugin using the P3 Profiler plugin and solve the problem with a better replacement.

6- Your website has been hacked

A hacked website often results in abnormal resource usage in your account and excessive CPU load due to the multiple automated and additional activities it generally has to perform each time a page is attempted to load. Most malicious users who try to hack your website aim to redirect users to a dangerous site or use your website to send spam.

 

In addition to using a secure password and keeping all software up-to-date, you should install a plugin, such as Sucuri, to scan your site and warn of possible hacks. For the last 30 days, have a backup to protect your site, so that if a problem occurs, you can easily use it to return your website to the version before it was hacked. If your website has been hacked, it should be manually checked by an expert, who may have to clean up the htaccess code or perform a code injection attack to stop hackers from diverting your website traffic to another website.

7- Have several WordPress websites on one website

Most dynamic content management systems, such as WordPress, store information in a database or databases. Each time a visitor comes to the site, PHP scripts interact with the database to retrieve this information. Call to send to the browser. If your site gets decent traffic in shared hosting spaces, using the current default WordPress system to recreate the same HTML page for every visitor request will be inefficient.

If your WordPress website users are advanced, it is recommended to use a caching plugin, such as W3 Total Cache. And for WordPress beginners, consider the WP Super Cache plugin and reduce the load on server resources by up to 90%. If you have multiple WordPress websites on a shared server, you will need more RAM and CPU to run the websites efficiently under a shared hosting account. So, think about getting extra hosting space for some of your blogs.

We suggest you read our article to get information on the most important area of ​​starting to learn programming.

8- High volume of web traffic

Traffic can occur for any of the following reasons:

  • When automated bots crawl your site.
  • When your website has spam in the comments section.
  • When other malicious activities are in progress.
  • When all the traffic allocated to the website is used in a short period,

If your website is popular, you may regularly encounter high CPU usage and need to upgrade one of your customers’ accounts from a shared host to a dedicated server. If an unexpected traffic spike occurs on your site just once, your hosting server will need more system resources to handle such a large amount of traffic.

High volume of web traffic

A completely static website with only HTML files and images is much lighter in terms of using shared server resources than dynamic websites based on Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress. When your web traffic increases, new website requests increase the need for server resources. You can upgrade your account to a VPS (virtual private server) or a dedicated server to access more resources.

The most common way to optimize your website with high traffic volume is to use caching (page cache and browser cache ) to reduce duplicate database connections and limit dynamic content such as plugins and modules.

9- Opening files or database connections

Your website should close a file or a database connection immediately when it is done. Otherwise, it will run a process that will not be closed, increase the website’s load, and may cause excessive consumption.

10- Wrong commands to the database

When you execute a query in the database, you should do it as optimally as possible.

If you want a part of a table, it is better to do this in a query than to call the whole database or table and find and select it in the website’s coding.

mistakes in website design

The mistakes that cause the website to be slow are:

1- Use cache plugins.

The cache plugin helps you load the contents that have already been downloaded faster.

By doing this, most of the website’s content that does not need to be changed is stored in the browser. This increases the website’s load speed and decreases the server load.

Famous cache plugins for WordPress are as follows.

  • W3 Total Cache
  • WP Super Cache
  • WP Rocket
  • Comet Cache
  • WP Fastest Cache

2- Using a CDN

Doing this almost guarantees that the speed of your website will increase, which is the use of content delivery networks, or CDN. With CDNs, static files, especially multimedia files, are loaded from the CDN’s servers, not the server you pay for. Also, its servers are closer to mistakes in website design for visitors. (You should read the article “What is CDN service “to understand this issue better.)

That’s why it’s a win-win situation. For this reason, it will be useful for you. You can use this guide to learn how to use Cloudflare.

Other CDNs are mentioned below:

  • MaxCDN
  • Amazon AWS
  • KeyCDN
  • WPPnto
  • CDN77

3- Compress website photos.

Compressing images plays an important role in the speed of your website, especially when you have many of them. Nowadays, high-quality photos are also expected.

Unfortunately, nowadays, most of these free software and plugins offer you this task, but they do not do it properly.

For this, you must use reliable software and plugins that have already been tested.

Also, you can use the Compressor.io website, which compresses your photos from 40 to 70 percent.

These website design mistakes do this for you completely free of charge, and you don’t need to add plugins to your website or download any software. You upload your photo, and it will show you live. How much compression is done