5 Common Website Mistakes to Avoid

1. Auto-renew your domain registration

Once I had a client whose domain wasn't set to automatically renew. Their domain name has three letters. Excellent value. And in the end, they were forced to pay more than 6 figures to buy it back from a poacher. Ouch!

Pro-tip: Pre-purchasing the registration for your domain for ten years is even preferable to auto-renewal. There is proof that this marginally improves your Google SEO ranking.

2. Backup your website regularly

I'm sure you are fully aware of all the main websites that are frequently hacked if you read the news at all. The reality is that the world is a huge, dangerous place, and you should regularly back up your website. At least once every month, but daily is ideal.

3. Get good hosting

Having doubts about the backup of your website? Consider this hint. Find quality hosting. In the past, I used to suggest businesses with hosting plans starting at $5/month. I've since had second thoughts. Poor hosting is simply not worth it, and it leaves you open to attack.



When you use shared hosting, all of the websites on the shared environment are vulnerable if one website on the server is hacked. On the other hand, a decent host will typically offer you daily backups of your website as well as daily scans for malware threats.

4. Don't break any links

One of the most crucial things to remember while redesigning your website is to not ruin your current SEO (search engine optimization). The main way to achieve this is to keep all links on your website intact. In other words, you should try to maintain the same URL structure. A redirect from the old URLs to the new ones may also be set up.

I'm curious if your website currently contains any broken links. To check for broken links, use a third-party program like this one: https://www.brokenlinkcheck.com/ 

5. Check your email hosting

Clients that don't consider where their email is currently being hosted make this mistake frequently, in my experience. The majority of people are unaware that email hosting and website hosting are two completely different things.

When someone starts a new website, they often fail to consider how their email is configured, and when they switch things up, the email setup can become seriously messed up. To sum up, make sure whoever is putting up your website for you considers how your email is now configured and doesn't mess anything up.