Over the course of owning websites, you’ll make mistakes. Some will be small ones, and some will cost you dearly, IF you choose to think of it that way. But it also holds true that the biggest mistakes you make as a website owner will also be the biggest lessons that teach you what to do and not do for your own sites, and for client sites.
So let me tell you the WORST Website Mistakes I Have Ever Made.
No antivirus, no firewall protection, no backup.
The first worst website mistake I ever made, was trying to run a website from a computer that wasn’t protected with antivirus and a firewall. To add insult to injury, I also didn’t know the importance of saving all your content and files remotely. I had *heard of* that, but I didn’t understand why it was important.
So, what happened? One fine day, my computer got a virus and blammo, all my data was lost.
What should I have done?
Back That Sht Up. Protect that computer. End of story.
The Second Worst Website Mistake: letting my web hosting sell me out.
The Second Worst Website Mistake I Have Ever Made, was letting my hosting company who I LOVED, sell their hosting plans right out from under me and all the other customers.
What happened? The old company bid us sionara with tearful goodbyes. The new company took over, and I instantly had a strong dislike for their lackadaisical ways, and seeming annoyance with me for asking questions about the products I had purchased from them.
I eventually moved to a new host from the old one, but the transition wasn’t seamless. One of my sites that I actually was making nice seasonal passive income from, was now stuck in limbo (meaning the URL). I wasn’t able to get to the domain from my new hosting space. So I bought a new variation of the domain, hoping that I could just re-upload the articles and ebook that I was selling there, to the new site.
The new site never did rank as well as it could, probably due to the old site links not being properly redirected. I lost interest in the project, and stopped making money on it.
What should I have done?
Researched a really good hosting company, and then QUICKLY MOVED my sites there as soon as I first realized the level of suck that the new host was giving.
The Third Worst Website Mistake I Have Ever Made: WordPress Reinstall Without Backing Up Images
My next massive (hopefully final) website mistake was thinking it would be a good idea to install a plugin that would add categorical directories to my site, which I planned to use to host a business listing index, and then doing it all wrong.
This totally frigged up my entire site, making my old directories obsolete, and… I don’t even know. It was structural mayhem.
When I went to rescue the old blog posts by downloading them and then reinstalling WordPress to upload them… the images didn’t transfer with the site, and a good half of them were gone due to having come from my phone uploads and not saved storage files.
So I reinstalled my site a SECOND time, and started creating new file names that were similar but not identical to the old file names… which created duplicate file issues with Google… and my site disappeared from Google entirely, it just refused to index.
To be honest, I don’t even know if that site will ever recover. It still lives on the web, something for me to fret and muck around with some more, if I ever get a free moment.
What I learned from this:
Images don’t export when you do a site export, apparently… or at least they don’t for some reason I’m not aware of. So if you plan to re-upload your WordPress files, you want to first be sure you’ve stored all the images, because you may have to re-insert them into each file in case they disappear. And yes, this will take a looooong time, if you have a big site with lots of content pages and posts.
I also learned that you can’t just delete or rename web pages. There must be a redirect, as long as the former link is out there somewhere.
Learning from Your Website Mistakes
Thankfully, I have never made a grave mistake of any of these types, on a CLIENT SITE. I only use MY OWN SITE to mess around and try different things. This has actually helped me learn in ways that I never would have been able to. Yes… the hard way. Yes… making mistakes is something people don’t like to talk about. But seriously. This is how we learn.
Are you a “learn by trial and error” type of person. Then you might want to do what I did. Create a website that is purely for experimental purposes. Tinker around, try this or that. It’s your little project. Pay attention to how things work. F around and find out!