With its ease of use, extensibility, and open-source nature, Joomla is a great platform to start a website on. Still, setting out in the sea of website management is not the piece of cake. Until you get enough hands-on experience, there are a lot of bumps to go through. Our post is aimed at easing up the starting a bit and providing you with the list of things you should avoid when running your Joomla website prepared by experts from Apptha.com.

1. Unconventional web designing

Website is not all about pulling a template off-the-shell and claiming you have pulled up an incredible designing for your site. Remember, with no proper research invested, the design that looks extraordinary in your browser will appear below ordinary on new and updated browsers of others. So, find solutions and pick templates or plugins that work well on all kinds of browsers without eating too much of loading time. Web designing is tricky, when handled properly pulls a lot of crowd with ease. It is always better to opt for a professional designer to handle your designing needs rather fancying it by yourself, unless you are pro !

2. Backfiring SEO strategy

While poor keyword choices and inconsistent content hurt SEO to a great extent, placing irrelevant information in the H-tags or heading tags add more woes to the injury. The H tag is exclusively designed for adding information about the “heading” of that particular page to get indexed by search engine spiders. But, oftentimes, people tend to fill it up with paragraphs, company information, and irrelevant details on the H tags, which in turn messes up the entire SEO process, leaving your site unnoticed by search engines; in other words, you lose potential customers on a constant basis.

3. Security fall back

As raising websites enforces no age restriction or any specific limitations, setting up a website becomes easy, and anyone can establish it at any time. Most of us fail to concern over the security issues of the sites, and especially, if the website is an online shop selling products, then it will lose its reputation among customers swiftly and all your valuable efforts for setting up the website will vanish in thin air. Security and safety of website is quite important, as even a system crash down due to various reasons easily destroys all your data. System with a low security measures takes too much of time to load, annoying most users. So, add necessary plugins to make your website completely secure and safe, and help to load faster.

4. Link woes

Helping a site getting indexed in search engines is a daunting task and almost impossible without link building. Generally, a website comprises two kinds of links, internal and external. When a user clicks an external link, the new page should pop-up, not exactly on the same window but on a new window. If it happens to be on the same window, then you are throwing away your precious customers to someone else. So, design your website in such a way that any user clicking the external link will be taken to a new window. It enables the customer to stay on your website for a while and gives him/her an opportunity to buy at least one of your products.

5. Copy/paste from MS Word

While MS Word is the automatic tool everyone turns out for when preparing content, loading the content directly into the Joomla HTML editor will take your website completely down. And you may have to wait for a long time to bring it up again; meanwhile you may lose potential data during the process. So, to avoid that better copy the content into a notepad before copying directly into Joomla editor to avert system crash down, and help your data stay safe. Let us add a couple more common mistakes that are really easy to fix, but which can cost you a lot, if neglected.

6. Using “Admin” as username

By going with the default username, you voluntarily give up half of the necessary access details to hackers. The only thing needed for them to break into your site is your password, which is not that hard to guess (especially if you’re using your birth date or something like that). So, first thing to do after you have set up your new Joomla site is to change default Admin username to a custom login and choose a long and random password for your account. Simple, but could save you from many security troubles.

7. Uploading images without resizing

Usually, users tend to upload images in their original size to Joomla and then resize them to suit the content. Visually, this works, but the “weight“ of an image isn’t changed by this, so if using extra large images, this slows down the page loading. It’s better to resize images using any of the image editors and only then upload them to Joomla.

8. Ignoring Alt tags

Images can be a used as one of the elements of SEO. For example, by using an Alt field, you tell a search engine what’s on the picture, as this is the only way a bot can recognize its content. So why not use this to include the keywords you’re optimizing the page for? With this little portion of info, you will be able to manage your Joomla website much more effectively.