All websites require maintenance to operate at their best, however, there is no denying that eCommerce website maintenance is far more important than any other website type for one simple reason. It will impact your sales.
Maintaining your eCommerce website ensures the best possible user experience for customers. This has a massive impact on the user experience because the less time a user has to think about if they need something, the more likely they are to buy it.
However, maintaining an eCommerce site is a lot of work due to all of the moving parts. While some of the basic stuff like keeping your site up to date needs to be done, there’s a lot more than meets the eye.
Today, I will share tips that can help you maintain your eCommerce site in WordPress.
Why Perform Maintenance on an eCommerce Website?
Imagine a new house was built. At first, it is the perfect home for your family, however, after several years, you start having various problems like the plumbing or the roof. A website isn’t very different.
As any site ages, the performance of that site will decrease unless developers take action to prevent this.
The good news is that running maintenance on an eCommerce website is not that complicated. In fact, you’re probably aware of many of the tips because they are not exactly a secret. Yet, running simple maintenance can significantly boost the performance of your site.
Some of the simple reasons why you should perform maintenance on an eCommerce site include:
- Improves Loading Times
- Enhances Security
- Reduces Downtime
- Improves User Experience
And most importantly, by improving all of these things, you can increase the number of sales your website makes, which is ultimately the goal of any eCommerce site. So without further ado, let’s begin.
1. Update WordPress Core Files, Plugins, and Themes
The first step of any maintenance strategy is to always ensure that your website and all of the tools you use on it are up to date. This includes your theme, the core files of WordPress, and the plugins you use.
Generally speaking, updates to these will squash bugs, improve security issues, and make performance improvements. And in other cases, they will introduce new features that your website can take advantage of to deliver a better experience.
Luckily, WordPress makes it extremely simple to update these files. Click on the Dashboard and select the Updates option.
Here, you will be able to view all of the current updates available in WordPress. This includes the core files, themes, and plugins you currently have installed on your website. You can also enable auto-updates to maintain this for you.
However, many sites will choose to not do this as sometimes an update can break something, thus many developers like to test it out in a testing environment before introducing it to their live site.
2. Fix Broken Links
As websites age, many links to posts, pages, and products break. This can be for a variety of reasons, like the URL structure of the site was changed, or because a product was removed from your store.
Regardless of the reason, these broken links not only frustrate users who run into them, but they also have a negative impact on your rankings when search engines run into them. As such, finding and fixing broken links is a top priority.
When it comes to finding these links, the Broken Link Checker is one of the best tools you can use in WordPress.
This plugin will scan your website for broken links. You can then manually review them or have the plugin automatically remove the link anywhere it appears on your website. This is a great way to ensure customers are only directed to existing products.
That said, it is worth pointing out that most all-in-one SEO tools now contain a tool similar to the Broken Link Checker, so you have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to correcting this problem.
3. Pick A Good Web Host
Does your website struggle when you receive high levels of traffic? This is most likely due to your current web hosting plan. Many sites start with smaller plans to save money as they establish an audience.
However, as your site grows, these budget plans are unable to keep up with your website’s traffic. This results in instances where users will spend much longer loading your pages, or be unable to load them, which is unacceptable for an eCommerce site.
There are also instances where a web host will just run into technical problems. This can cause your website and any other sites they host to go down. And as I’m sure you’re aware, a website that cannot be accessed is not going to make money.
Thus, you need to find a good web hosting company that can scale to your needs and deliver 99.9% uptimes at a fair cost.
This is where a company like GreenGeeks comes in. We can provide you with the necessary resources your eCommerce site will need to succeed at any size with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
And we manage to do this without adding to the emission problem our industry is infamous for. We accomplish this by calculating all of the energy we use and purchasing three times that amount in clean wind energy.
4. Flush Your Cache
Any eCommerce site worth its salt should have a caching solution in place. Caching allows websites to store and deliver frequently accessed web content to customers quicker than normal.
While this is a great thing, eCommerce sites regularly have deals come and go and are constantly updating their landing pages to keep up. As such, you need to regularly flush your cache, otherwise, you may be displaying older content.
This can result in displaying sales information that is no longer accurate which could anger customers.
As such you will need to clear or flush the cache. Luckily, for most caching plugins in WordPress, this just boils down to locating the “Clear Cache” button and pressing it. This depends entirely on the caching solution you use.
You should also keep in mind that some caching plugins and tools will flush the cache automatically when new content is detected.
Be sure to refer to any documentation from your caching solution to carry out this operation. Regular sites should clear their caches every month or two, however, eCommerce sites are updated more frequently.
Thus, you will need to find a schedule that works for your site to ensure you are always delivering the latest content to customers.
5. Perform Content Sweeps
Stores are constantly offering new products, deals, promotions, and whatnot. In most cases, these kinds of promotions are not permanent additions to your store. Yet, when they are being promoted, they can be found virtually anywhere on the site.
At least if you are marketing them correctly.
The problem arises when you stop offering the promotion. You need to erase any trace of these expired promotions, so you do not confuse customers into thinking they are still active.
And I know what you are thinking, as long as I include an expiration date it’s fine. That’s just not true.
If customers see a deal being advertised or mentioned on your site, they will assume it is still accurate as most don’t actually read the dates. This will create a headache for any support agent that has to deal with them, which can clog up your support lines.
As such, you need to perform a content sweep, which is essentially going through your website and making sure that all of the current promotions are displayed while the older ones are not. This should be performed every time a deal ends.
Luckily, a lot of eCommerce plugins for WordPress will automatically clear expired deals and discounts.
6. Ensure Your Store Is Being Backed Up Regularly
Backups are excellent recovery tools that all websites depend on to recover from disasters. These disasters can be caused by human error, or by cyber-attacks, but regardless of the reason, every eCommerce site should have one.
Unlike traditional sites like blogs, an eCommerce site also stores information on their customers. Keeping track of this information is vital for most sites and can be extremely beneficial if data is lost or compromised.
Luckily, WordPress has a wonderful selection of backup plugins that you can install today.
Most of them work identically and allow you to make a copy of your website that you can easily restore with the click of a button. And more importantly, they allow you to set these backups up automatically.
Doing so is highly recommended as this reduces the chances of you forgetting to back up your site and having to load an older version of the site in the wake of a disaster. Just make sure to store the backup in a separate location from your website.
After all, if your website was compromised and your backup was stored in the same location, it too would be compromised. As such, you should store it on an independent HDD or in a cloud environment where you can access it from anywhere.
7. Optimize Your Product Images
One of the most important aspects of any online store would be the ability for customers to see what they are buying. As such, every single product on your storefront should have images to show it off.
However, unoptimized images can drastically slow down your website, which impacts your rankings. As such, you should run routine image optimization scans in WordPress to identify and correct any images that are larger than they need to be.
While several tools can do this, one of the best is the Smush plugin. It specializes in image compression.
Upon installing the plugin, you can set it up to automatically compress newly added images, scan your existing images, and identify which images need to be compressed. From there, run the compression tools, and your images will be optimized.
Naturally, the process may take some time on the first use as eCommerce stores typically have hundreds if not thousands of images. Thus, the process could take several hours to complete, but if set up right, the plugin will handle everything.
8. Test Your Checkout Process
The checkout process is the most important aspect of any eCommerce site. As it allows the customers to purchase the items they have added to their cart. As such, you need to make sure this is working at all times.
Thus, whenever an update goes live on your site, or any changes are made whatsoever, the first thing you should do is go through the checkout purchase and make sure it is working as intended.
Failure to do this could leave your site unable to sell products for an extended period of time if you do not catch it.
This is also a great opportunity to see if there are any ways you can improve the checkout process. For example, some users may prefer using PayPal checkout which just requires them to log in and have PayPal handle the rest.
Thus, while you are testing the system to make sure it works; you can also use this as an opportunity to figure out how to improve the experience overall. After all, a streamlined checkout process is critical to boosting sales.
9. Review Any User Feedback
Online stores have a lot of moving parts, which can make it extremely challenging to figure out when something goes wrong or what the source is, which is why backups are so important. However, you’re not alone, your entire community can help.
Most sites have feedback options where users can submit feedback or report bugs to the site owners. This is a great resource for developers and can help maintain your site and identify problem areas.
In some cases, users will identify features that can be improved upon, like the checkout area.
Naturally, the first thing you want to do is set up an actual feedback component for your website. This can be done easily by using a contact form plugin to create a simple form users can use to submit bug reports or feedback.
Staying up to date on user feedback will help you continue to evolve your website, as well as identify current problems the site is facing. That said, just be aware that not all users will be helpful in this endeavor.
Some user feedback may not be helpful, or may just be spam. As such, you need to be vigilant to avoid listing to fake feedback.
10. Make Sure Your Security Plugin Is Working
Online stores contain a lot of user information like their home address and credit card information. As such, they are constantly under attack from hackers. While WordPress is a very safe platform, it also has a big target on its back.
Thus, you need to improve the security of your WordPress install by using a plugin. Ensuring that your website is safe is naturally one of the most important aspects of carrying out maintenance on an eCommerce website.
While there are a lot of security plugins to choose from, I strongly recommend using WordFence.
Simply put, it is one of the most comprehensive tools you can use to protect your WordPress website. Once it is set up, it will do most of the work without needing any additional input.
From time to time, you may receive security notifications. This is where the maintenance comes into play. You should always be clearing these warnings to ensure your site is as safe as possible.
11. View the Error Log
Another way to see what is going wrong on your website is to keep an eye on your website’s error log. This will list all of the errors your website has run into over a set time period. Checking it regularly can expose common problems.
While there are several ways to access the error log, the easiest way is to access it directly from your cPanel. The cPanel has an error log you can check at any time, the only downside is that if you have other domains on your web hosting plan, it will list those errors as well.
In those circumstances, you may want to install a plugin like the Debug Log Manager for WordPress.
This can allow you to view the error log directly in WordPress. Thus, it can make it a bit easier to carry out the maintenance on your eCommerce site if it is all done directly from within WordPress.
12. Create A Maintenance Plan
The final tip I want to share is that once you go through these and any others you may already be doing, you should create a maintenance plan that you can follow. And I don’t mean a mental one.
Actually, take a few minutes and create a checklist that you will routinely carry out. In fact, you may want to create multiple checklists. For instance, perhaps you want one for after an update goes live and another for monthly maintenance.
This will ensure you never forget to carry out any maintenance tasks for your site.
More importantly, you may eventually expand the staff that work on your site. This list of maintenance steps can also be helpful for anyone else who needs to carry these out, thus it is just an excellent idea to put it in writing.
Consider Hiring a Support Agency
You’re busy and may not have time to carry out routine maintenance on your eCommerce site. Or, you may just not have the technical knowledge to do it and that’s not a problem.
There are dozens of support agencies that you can hire to help maintain your website.
These support agencies typically focus on specific types of businesses like eCommerce sites, blogs, and specific platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and so on. You simply need to find an agency that matches your needs.
Essentially, these agencies will carry out the maintenance for you for a monthly fee. You may think that this is extremely expensive, but many of them are under $100 per month, but it depends on the agency and what they need to do.
That said, each agency is different, and there may be higher costs for the initial maintenance of your website. These agencies have to spend more time understanding your site and the tools you have on it.
Perform Maintenance on Your eCommerce Website Today
While there is a lot you can do, performing maintenance on your eCommerce website is not that complicated. Instead, it is just a lot of work that needs to be done regularly to get the best results.
As a result, the cost of performing maintenance on an eCommerce website is not very high besides the time you put into it.
Luckily, WordPress has a huge library of plugins that can help you make quick work of routine maintenance. Doing so will ensure that your website is running at peak performance.
I hope you found these tips useful for maintaining an eCommerce website.
How often do you perform maintenance on your eCommerce website? What tools do you use to help?
