- 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.
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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.
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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.