When you are facing with the Drupal for the firsts time ever, it might be complicated. That’s why it is important to be prepared for launching your new site at Drupal CMF. So, we analysed for you 5 most common mistakes inexperienced users make and a little bit of information and tips on how to avoid them in the future.
Wrong Site Building And Unused Modules
When you start your first Drupal project, surely there will be some complications, and of course they will came out on the step of website installation and configuration. On the first steps, you can set up wrong folder structure and put themes and modules in the folder on a root level, but you should locate themes in sites/default/themes then modules in sites/default/modules/contrib and so on.
If you do not check modules status for instance, usage, last updates, you have risk to download the unsupported modules. That is why always read the description before installing the module. When you have out-of-date module on your Drupal site, there may occur some functionality problems. It is easy to overlook this, but at the same time it is easy to correct them. Just disable all not-essential mods and they won’t confuse you anymore.
Disregarding to Use a Drupal Caching
That all concerns cache, Drupal speed, and performance optimisation. If you fail to configure the cache properly, there will be bootstrapped every time and the page load time will increase. For websites with thousands of users every day, the cache system has to be implemented immediately. Drupal has a pluggable caching system, in this case you can use contributed modules to improve the cache. Boost is one of the popular caching system used in Drupal.
Drupal SEO Faults
Drupal is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS, but not all the websites are successful in this perspective.
The one of SEO mistakes refer to the keywords. You can choose a lot of the terms for your product, but nobody actually search for it, then the ratings, even if they are high enough, does not matter at all. So, take your time and pick up right keywords for your website.
Some of other are:
- There is no analytic software installed for tracking your site statistics, in this case add Google Analytics to your site;
- If a website is build more for the view than for the search engines, make sure your keyword appears on the page with a lot of graphs content;
- If you have a good site with a nice content, it is still not enough to be ranked on the top of Google searches. There is a need for good external links in order to get ranks.
Duplicated Content Caused by “Clean URL’s”
Rather common Drupal SEO confusion is a duplicate content. That occurs, when the clean URL’s is turned on. So, if you enable “Clean URL’s” install Global Redirect module to fix an issue that comes up. It is also recommended using Drupal SEO Checklist which will help you to check your website for a proper search engine optimization and track what have been already done for SEO.
Leave a Site Open to Spam
A lot of website users face tons of spam on a daily basis, and one of the biggest mistakes is to live you site open to all. There are spam users, spam content, spam comment and many others which are the huge risk for any site grows and credibility. Yes, Drupal is one of the most safe when it comes to the span, but it is rather pointless if you do not know hot to set it up. Spam protection can be done in different ways. First of all you can do it automatically by installing the module or writing a code. Another way to prevent spammer is to challenge users with a turing tests. And the one, level permission, used by lots of website owners or contributors which requires a work. In this way, you disallow to post or comment without admin approval. Along with this, there is no right choice for how to defend yourself from spam attacks. However, it is important to use some methods of preserving.
Refuse to Back up Drupal Website
It is necessary for users to backup Drupal site, especially it is crucial for newbies. Backup a website before making any serious changes or installing the modules, so that you can restore to the original variant in any case. Lots of users spending hours for restoring a website as they failed to save and then, screwed something up. When you use a Drupal backup modules, then you can dump some parts or the whole database and save it on the server or some offsite and then restore it any time.
The Closure
You have already finished to get acquainted with the most common Drupal mistakes any developer has to avoid. The main message is when you are well-prepared for a Drupal site you can do almost amazing things with your web project. And in case, you want to migrate Drupal CMF, there is automated tool aisite which will help you to proceed with a maximum accurate and smooth conversion process.
