If you have an eCommerce website & you want to grow your online sales, you definitely need to maintain it regularly.
Website maintenance is as important as its development, especially in the case of eCommerce stores.
Why it’s so important to maintain your eCommerce website?
- To have regular backups.
- To have updated information on the website.
- To always have updated product details.
- To secure an eCommerce website from different kinds of security threats.
- To boost SEO rankings.
- To ensure the optimized loading speed of all the web pages.
- To ensure the compatibility of the website with different browsers & devices.
- Ensure that all the plugins, themes, and core software are always up-to-date.
- Ensure that the website is always performing well and you don’t have to spend money on redoing your whole website from scratch. In other words, regular maintenance of your website also helps you to save your website development cost.
Now that we know how important it is to maintain a website, let’s find out how we can maintain our eCommerce website effectively.
#1 SEO tags implementation
Implementing proper SEO tags for all the web pages of your eCommerce site is perhaps one of the most important things that you could do to maintain your online store.
Here are some of the useful SEO tags that you can take care of in your store:
- Title tag: You must have a unique title tag for every webpage of your online store. This tag should let the users & search engines know about the topic or title of your page.
- Description tag: This is another important meta tag that you must have on each page of your website. Again, the description tag has to be unique for each webpage. The description tags should have a brief about your webpage.
- Anchor tags: This tag is associated with the links on your web pages.
- Header tags: You may also use header tags such as h1, h2, h3, etc on every webpage that contains the titles and subtitles.
#2 Security compliance
If you run an eCommerce store and expect your potential buyers to pay you online, you must make sure to secure your website.
If your website is not secure, your online shoppers may not be comfortable purchasing your products & paying you online. What’s even worst is, your users can immediately quit your website to never return back again if they see any security warnings on your website.
Can you imagine buying a product from a website that shows security warning errors? Certainly not, isn’t it?
Securing your eCommerce website is an integral part of our website maintenance process.
How can you or your website developer secure your eCommerce store?
- Installing and configuring SSL.
- Changing the conventional URL & username of your website’s admin area.
- Updating all the plugins & themes regularly.
- Ensuring all the passwords are stronger.
- Restricting access to critical files of your website.
- Hiding the software version & details of your website CMS.
#3 Speed optimization
The loading speed of a website has to be optimized for a better user experience.
Especially in the case of eCommerce websites, where you have to deliver a seamless experience to your online shoppers so that they can make their buying decision quickly, the loading speed is very crucial.
Various online studies have shown that a difference of even a few seconds in the loading speed can make a huge difference in the conversions of an eCommerce store.
In simpler words, the lesser time your site takes to load the web pages, the more conversions & sales you can expect.
Here are some of the major reasons why you should take the loading speed of your website seriously:
- Enhanced user experience.
- More conversions.
- Less bounce rate & higher user engagement.
- Better SEO rankings.
It is, therefore, important for you to take care of the website’s loading speed as a part of your website maintenance.
Below are some of the effective ways to optimize the loading speed of your eCommerce store:
- Optimize all the images on your website.
- Use Gzip compression with the help of your website builder or hosting company.
- Install & configure a cache plugin with your website.
- Minify the CSS & JS scripts of your website with the help of a plugin like “WP Total Cache”.
Even if you hire a website developer to maintain your online store, you must make sure that regular checking & fixing of the website’s loading speed must be included in our web maintenance proposal.
#4 Updated content
The maintenance of your eCommerce website is also important to deliver fresh & updated information to your potential customers.
Who likes outdated information anyway? The same is the case with your online shoppers too.
Here are some of the items that you must update on your website regularly:
- All the contents of webpages like FAQ, about us, etc.
- All the products and their details such as price etc.
- The contact details of your website such as the address, phone number, etc.
- New blog posts should be written & posted on your eCommerce store.
- The information like terms & conditions and policy etc. should be updated regularly.
#5 Regular backups
No matter how secure your website is, you still need a backup plan just in case you may need it.
There could be a sudden loss of data or files because of some unforeseeable & unpredictable issues on the website or server. It is, therefore, necessary for you to back up your eCommerce website regularly and always have a fully-functional yet latest version of your website.
When you have the latest backup of your website, the restoration process becomes easier for your website builder.
Even if you hire a website developer for the maintenance of your eCommerce store, make sure to include the regular backing up of the website as one of the important items of your agreement.
Recommended post: The 5 best plugins to backup your WordPress website
#6 Misc performance checks
To make sure that your eCommerce store always delivers the best browsing experience to your users, you need to make a quick checklist and test & check your website for those items regularly.
Here is a quick performance-related checklist for you:
- Broken links checking & fixing.
- Grammatical errors on your website.
- Form validations & form submissions.
- Browser compatibility
- Mobile devices compatibility
- Image optimization
