Your eCommerce website is vital to the success of your business, and its maintenance should be a high priority. If your eCommerce site is neglected, it can reflect on your customer’s shopping experience, resulting in loss of sales and consumer engagement.
Regular maintenance will not only guarantee a good and efficient user experience for your customers but also maintain your page speed and ensure security. It will also help you maintain a good reputation among your customers, helping you stay ahead of your competitors.
Below you can find an eCommerce website maintenance checklist which has been designed by our website development experts in ExtraDigital; you can also find more about our website management services here.
Product, price, and pages
While you add and remove pages and products on your website, you need to update information such as product descriptions, price, and service offerings accordingly; this makes sure that your customers are all receiving correct information without any confusion.
Change the design of your websites
A dated layout will cause users to lose trust in your brand and while refreshing your website’s look to stay up-to-date with the trends is essential, you must test the changes thoroughly. A simple change to design can cause havoc in the site’s code, leading to a whole host of issues you may not realise until you run through a list of checks and tests.
Compatibility
Also ensure that your websites are fully compatible with different screens such as mobiles, tablets, and desktops. Again, any small change in design, (new button added, new page added to the menu), could have an adverse effect on the mobile or tablet view.
Security is of utmost importance
Your eCommerce platform will store confidential data, such as your customer’s address and payment details, so SSL certificates build trust in your brand and protect your business from being hacked. Security maintenance is something that cannot be ignored as it can land you in hot water if you neglect it!
Functionality add-ons
Sometimes, your content management system (CMS) may not have all the functionality to accommodate your website’s needs; this is when you integrate third-party plugins. With plugins, you can add features to block spam comments, create contact forms, support various languages, and much more.
As third-party plugins can influence your page speed, which has a direct impact on your site’s user experience & therefore Google rankings, you want to consider which plugins you use carefully. You will need to ensure you perform regular maintenance checks on these to ensure they are updated and functioning correctly.
Broken Links
Check, identify, and fix the broken links on your website. As we mentioned above, giving inaccurate information can be annoying to your customers. Similarly, if the links lead to incorrect or irrelevant pages or worse, 404 not found error pages, you can quickly lose those customers, not to mention seriously harm your rankings.
Update your information
If you have made any recent changes to your business, for example, your business name, logo designs, email address, or telephone number, you must update those in your pages. Similarly, important information such as terms and conditions and privacy policies should be regularly reviewed and updated if needed.
Also, ensure that your method of contact, for instance, contact forms or live chats are working well.
Revisiting your website SEO
Frequently revisiting your SEO tactics and updating them can improve your website performance. It can attract relevant and high-quality audiences leading to high traffic and conversions.
Publishing fresh, new content to your site is essential as it is great for your rankings, but we always advise to test and then re-test when any change is made to a client’s website – as even small changes can sometimes cause errors in other places.
SEO Experts
If you are unsure about how you can develop SEO tactics that work well for your eCommerce business, you can consult our SEO experts.
At ExtraDigital, we believe that routine checks on your eCommerce website are more than just adding new products and information. It’s about ensuring that your site is user-friendly and fully functional so that you are attracting and retaining those essential customers. This takes work on not only the front-end but the back-end as well, ensuring your site’s coding and architecture is set for success.
If you want to enhance your existing eCommerce website or you are looking to set up an online business from scratch, our website development experts have years of experience. They are proficient at using various eCommerce software including Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify and CS-Cart, and more.
Get in touch and find out more about how we can help you grow your eCommerce business further.
