Monthly Checklist For Your E-commerce Store Maintenance

May 3, 2021 EvinceMage . 0 Comments

Creating a website is just the beginning. You need to regularly update and maintain your site to ensure it runs at full capacity. Regular website maintenance also helps prevent cyberattacks, increase visitors, and boost ranking in search engines.

Besides, 75% of consumers judge a company’s credibility based on their website’s design. The non-maintenance of websites will make it difficult to keep up with your customers’ expectations and lead them to your competitors.

To make ecommerce maintenance easier for you, we have outlined a list of tasks that you should be doing regularly. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Types of Maintenance

Ecommerce website maintenance tasks are broadly divided into three categories:

Website SEO and performance: It helps ensure optimal user experience and improve your site’s ranking in search engines.
Security maintenance: With cyberattacks on the rise, security maintenance has become more important than ever. Also, websites that have been hacked are more likely to lose their rankings on search engine results pages.
Inventory maintenance: It enables you to fulfill customers’ orders on time, reduce frustration, and improve your delivery.

Now, let’s look at how to do ecommerce maintenance.

Website SEO and Performance

In this section, we will discuss tasks for peak performance and better ecommerce SEO.

SEO: Use tools like Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to run SEO audits to determine SEO issues on your site. These tools also provide recommendations to fix those problems.

Check and remove broken links: Broken links can negatively affect the user experience as it leads users to a “not found” page. Use tools like Screaming Frog to detect broken links in your site and remove them.

Website Speed: Website speed is one of the critical ranking factors. It also affects your bounce rate. Over time, your website’s weight (your site’s overall size) will increase, leading to higher load times. Maintenance helps keep website weight checked and reduce loading times (should be less than 4 seconds). Use tools like PageSpeed Insights to check how quickly your site loads on mobile and desktop. Then, follow the recommendations to improve it.

Update content: Search engines want to provide their users with the most relevant and up-to-date content. Therefore, it is essential to publish new content and update the old ones to improve your rankings.

Test website forms: Forms are a critical part of any website. When users spend their time to fill forms on your site, it should lead them to somewhere (or at least a message saying that their details have been saved). Test all your forms and CTAs to ensure they are working as expected.

Review order process: How easy is it to purchase from your website? What are the steps that a customer has to take to buy products from you? During maintenance, make your order process as simple as possible.

Test the checkout process: Check if the checkout process is smooth. Ensure all your payment methods are working efficiently. If you run your ecommerce site on Magento, you can even use Auto Related Product Magento 2 Extension to cross-sell complementary products during checkout. This will help increase sales and the average order value.

Security Maintenance

Regular ecommerce security maintenance helps prevent hackers from stealing sensitive information from your website.

Security patches: It is a program that fixes and plugs any vulnerabilities on your site that could pose a security threat. Regularly updating security patches keeps hackers away from any backdoors on your site that might enable them to access your customers’ details or even remotely control your website.

SSL Certification: SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certification has become a must for every website. It encrypts sensitive customer information (like passwords, addresses, and credit card numbers). Also, Google prefers websites with SSL certificates over the ones without them. Make sure to use the right SSL certificate for your site and renew them every year.

Secure Transaction: SET (Secure Electronic Transaction) is a system that ensures the security and integrity of online transactions. It helps confirm if the customer is the intended user for the transaction.

Website backups: Website backups help you restore an older version of your site in case of cyberattacks. It also prevents you from ransomware attacks (as you can just restore your site instead of paying the ransom). Regular website backups enable you to save the latest version of your site.

Inventory Maintenance

For every ecommerce website, inventory maintenance is a must. Wrong numbers and out-of-stock items can hurt your brand’s image. Here’s what you can do.

Product availability check: Do you have all the products listed on your website available? Inventory maintenance helps ensure customers cannot order items that you don’t have in stock.

Promotions and price changes on products: To succeed in the ecommerce business, you need to adjust prices as per what your competitors charge. To automatically manage price changes, you can use price monitoring tools.

Adding new products: When selling new products, it is essential that those pages are optimized for search engines. Regular maintenance ensures new product pages offer the same experience to your customers as other web pages.

Benefits of regularly maintained ecommerce store

Now that you know the different types of website maintenance let’s understand why it is important.

Protection from hackers: Older sites are more likely to get hacked as they have less secure codes and outdated modules. Regular maintenance helps protect your site and customers’ information from hackers. It also ensures secure transactions in ecommerce stores.

High-quality customer experience: Every time you perform website maintenance, your site improves and becomes easier to use. Besides, it allows you to keep up with the changing user behavior, thereby improving customer experience and encouraging engagement.

Increase the credibility: An unmaintained website can misinform users and even display wrong prices. This increases the risk of losing customers’ trust and credibility, which will affect your conversion rate.

Improve sales: A regularly maintained website is easy to navigate and has a smooth checkout process. It will also have better security - all of which encourages users to buy from you.

Too busy to maintain your online store regularly!

Website maintenance is a regular task and requires you to spend a significant amount of time. But, the good news is, you can hire a website maintenance team to do all the hard work for you.

If you have a Magento ecommerce store, you can hire Magento specialists for your site maintenance. They have the necessary platform expertise and can better maintain your website compared to those that don’t.

Hiring maintenance experts will enable you to focus on your business’s essential tasks, such as sourcing products and fulfilling customers’ orders.

Conclusion

Regular website maintenance has become more important than ever. It protects you from hackers, ensures a high-quality customer experience, enhances your business’s credibility, and improves sales.

Make sure to focus on all three parts of the website when performing ecommerce maintenance (SEO & performance, security, and inventory). Or you can hire an expert to maintain your site and keep it updated. Happy Ecommerce Website Maintenance!