10 Step Guide on How to Maintain an Ecommerce Website
Making sales is the sole purpose of starting an ecommerce business. And all your sales funnels eventually propel prospective customers to your website. Hence, you can’t succeed in the ecommerce business without having your website up and running smoothly. That’s where ecommerce website maintenance enters the picture. What’s more dejecting for visitors if they come all the way to your website only to discover that it isn’t operating properly? On top of that, you have to invest a good amount of money to acquire customers. So, maintaining an ecommerce website has no alternative to help you make sufficient profits.
Why Does Ecommerce Website Maintenance Matter?
A malfunctioning website can seriously affect the conversion rate. All your hard work in making an ecommerce site and earning a reputation will go in vain if your website isn’t maintained routinely. You’re less likely to face probable glitches if you use a quality enterprise ecommerce platform. However, ecommerce website maintenance matters a lot for the following reasons.
You can:
- Reduce the cart abandonment rate to a great extent
- Provide enhanced user experiences for the visitors
- Keep the site compatible with new updates
- Provide up-to-date content for the readers
- Gain customers trust in terms of security
- Improve overall SEO rankings
- Increase traffic to your ecommerce site.
How to Maintain an Ecommerce Website
Websites with slow load speed cause a $2.6 billion loss in revenue each year. 89% of customers tend to buy from a competitor after they experience poor issues with a website. Compiling these two stats, it becomes obvious that poorly maintained websites harm ecommerce businesses to a great extent. Don’t worry! Here, we have enlisted the best ecommerce maintenance practices to enlighten you.
Review Your Website Information
Start your inspection with the domain name. Your domain name carries the identity of your eCommerce business. Ensure that you’re paying the domain and hosting fees timely so that it doesn’t get taken away from you. Carefully take note of your hosting credentials, admin information, FTP access information, third-party extension details, social media profile details, all company email names and passwords, and CRM account information. You never know when you’ll need these credentials to facilitate a smooth journey of your business.
Ensure Optimal Security
Security is the main concern when it comes to website maintenance. It’s important to ensure high-level security to safeguard your website from hackers. Every day many company websites get compromised because of a poor security system. Ecommerce sites are more sensitive since they save customers’ personal details and payment information for future use. Examine both your website and server to find out security pitfalls and potential threats. Pay close attention to SQL injection, malware attacks, XSS, and SSL to ensure website security. Optimize your website in a way so that customers can trust you while making transactions.
Check the UI & UX Design
You will hardly find a website that doesn’t have a design issue. Developers and designers work relentlessly every day to solve new and unique issues. Encourage your employees to convey the message to the developer team whenever they find a design issue. This is a continuous process. Keep the UI and UX design tidy so that customers have a great user experience while shopping from your online store.
Update Product Information
Suppose you used to sell a product that has been recently discontinued by the supplier or manufacturer. Is it appropriate to keep it on the website anymore? Besides, product prices and specifications may also change slightly for many reasons. Keep them updated in real-time so that your customers don’t end up ordering something you don’t have or can’t deliver as promised. Keep all product information updated including product descriptions, specifications, and prices. And don’t forget to identify obsolete content and refine them in keeping with new trends.
Investigate SEO Health
It’s very important to audit the SEO scores of your website once in a while. Without a properly SEO-optimized ecommerce website, you will lose a significant number of visitors and your site rankings will surely have a downturn. Check the entire website for broken links. SEO practices involve a great number of outbound and inbound links. Make sure all links look natural and relevant to their context. Fix or delete any broken links and get rid of all 404 errors. Moreover, audit all your meta titles and descriptions. Keep them confined within the acceptable pixel length is preferred by search engines. Optimize the site speed as well to improve your website’s SEO health.
Create a Website Backup
You can’t afford to lose valuable customer data and programming data that have been collected and implemented throughout a long period of time. How would you feel if your PC hard disk got crashed? Losing a website’s data gives us the same feeling. Store all your data in a separate place where data loss is less likely to happen. Create a website backup almost every day so that you never lose any fragment of your work.
Review Browser Compatibility
Most people use Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox as their go-to browsers. But there are still a few other browsers that have a great number of users. You need to ensure that your website is equally responsive to all browsers regardless of the device and operating system. A responsive website increases conversions significantly.
Optimize the Shopping Cart
Numerous customers add products to their carts but leave the site without completing the checkout process. This is called cart abandonment. Website errors, poor navigation, bad shipping policies, weak payment gateway, etc. are some of the major reasons behind cart abandonment. Some of them leave their cart because they need to input a lot of personal information. Some carts don’t remember your added product once you go back or move forward to another page. All these glitches contribute to increasing cart abandonment rates. You should maintain the shopping cart and checkout process properly to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions.
Check for Other Issues
When visitors input data through a form or any other way, make sure that you’re receiving them at the backend as desired. Check your contact details on whether or not they’re directing visitors to the right place. Measure the success of your website using analytics and get credible information about user behavior- how visitors react to different components of the website. You can conduct A/B testing on different versions of the website to determine which version performs the best in terms of conversions. Scrutinize and remove spam comments, links, and reviews. Keep your website as clean and clutter-free as possible. If your website loads slowly, immediately employ a team to find out underlying issues and have them fixed ASAP.
Use Google Tag Manager
To run your website smoothly you need to use third-party codes. Google Analytics, Hotjar, LiveChat, Adwords, etc. tool effectuate a few code snippets. You can use Google Tag Manager to manage these codes more easily and efficiently. This tool enables users to have great control over each script, remove unnecessary tools, track events without harming HTML code, set up more advanced analytics, and more. Simply put, Google Tag Manager makes ecommerce website maintenance more convenient and efficient.
Regular ecommerce website maintenance will help you enhance the user experience, secure your website data, improve its SEO health, and generate more sales in the long run. Get rid of the glitches all by yourself before they get exposed to the visitors.
Royex Technologies, a leading Website, Mobile App, and E-commerce Development Company in Dubai, have certified developers who can bring reality to any of your ideas. We have experience in developing over 300 projects for our clients in the GCC which includes several E-commerce websites, service applications, etc, so we have the expertise perfect for your e-commerce requirements. If you need an eCommerce website with SEO optimizations, feel free to call us at +971566027916 or mail us at info@royex.net and we can send you a proposal based on your idea.