Introduction
As technology moves faster than ever, online consumer habits change quite frequently. keeping an evergreen site up-to-date to reflect these changes is crucial for success. Web maintenance is something that you’ll need to do weekly, monthly, and yearly throughout the time your website is live. It helps keep a check on how your web store is performing and is in line with the latest trends.
A website maintenance strategy is one of the most important elements of an e-commerce business. It can help your business to grow bigger, more stable, and more sustainable. There are many things you need to optimize to keep your website running as a powerful source of traffic growth. As an e-commerce business owner, you may be wondering how to maintain and scale your website in the future.
To help you keep things simple, here’s a list of effective maintenance strategies and website designing solutions that will help speed up your e-commerce business in the year 2023.
Web Maintenance Strategies
How does your website hold up in today’s digital market? It needs to keep pace with the fast-paced world of technology and business. But, how can you make sure your website is ready for the future? And how can it scale up as a business moves forward? Having a well-thought strategy can help you achieve it. Below are the pointers you must add to your web maintenance strategy:
1. Perform Important Website Maintenance Tests
Annual Website Testing
You must test your website’s functionality once a year and after each update. Here’s what you need to do:
- Remove the broken links within the website pages and other content.
- Updated the outdated and incorrect information.
- Get feedback from new users or people not associated with your business about the site’s usability.
Browser Compatibility Test
Your website should present itself appropriately across different mainstream web browsers. It helps broaden your reach to your greater target audience. It can be done once a year.
Checkout Flow And Forms Test
Ensure all forms and pages of your website checkout process are in place and properly working. It should be checked quarterly every year. Checkout flow includes the following:
- Pre-checkout process: Ensure all the information on the product page is available. It will accelerate customers’ decision-making process for the final purchase.
- Add to cart option: Ensure the Add-to card option is clearly visible to website store visitors.
- Billing info and Shipping info: Check whether product pricing, in-stoke number, etc., are updated. Customers must get well-publicized receipts, including delivery charges.
- Confirmation emails: Ensure your customers are getting confirmation emails timely after they make the purchase. It is essential as a glitch in sending purchase confirmation on time can negatively affect a buyer’s decision-making process.
- Shopping Method: Ensure all your payment methods are active and working seamlessly. Taking too much time to confirm a purchase causes inconvenience to buyers, which increases their chances of incomplete purchases.
Software Update Checks
It is a monthly website maintenance process that ensures your website’s internal functionality is at its best. Make sure to check for monthly updates from all your associated providers. These will include software from your security provider, hosting provider, and any other 3rd party service providers. Keeping your e-commerce website up-to-date is important to maintain its security and functionality. It is highly recommended to install patches as soon as they are released. Patches address security vulnerabilities within the product and fix performance bugs. You can hire a web design company that provides professional website maintenance services.
Website Backup
Backing up your website content will save you unnecessary stress and time. It will keep your valuable website data safe. If your website has an automatic backing up feature, then use it religiously. Ensure to check its functioning each month.
In case your website does not feature automatic backups, you will need to do it manually once a month.
Key Metric Reviews
Key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be reviewed often to ensure your efforts are helping reach your goals. Google Analytics is the best tool to check KPIs for your website. Ensure to run the test once every week.
Make the necessary updates wherever needed. You must keep checking and improving your KPIs until they show the expected results.
2. Get Essential Website Maintenance Tools
You learned where you need to focus on ensuring a healthy e-commerce website. Next, you should have tools to measure your efforts. There is no need to explain why measuring the performance of the optimized website is important. Here are the top website support and maintenance tools marketers need in 2023 and ahead.
Google PageRank Checker
The web maintenance tool is vital for improving your website’s SEO ranking. It checks the link analysis algorithm of Google and calculates the links directed toward a website along with their quality. These tools display page rank using a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is the lowest.
Page Speed Test
Visitors prefer websites whose pages load quickly. Website owners can get the necessary information about a domain’s page loading speed using the Page Speed test tool.
Website SEO Score Checker
A business website needs a good SEO score to come under the radar of its target audience. An in-depth SEO check presents extensive data on your website. These include MOZ authority, URL analysis, backlinks, domain age, backlinks summary, meta tags, word count, and many others.
Mobile Friendly Test
The tool lets you learn the responsiveness level and page score of your website’s design. Thus, you get access to important analysis on what’s working perfectly and what needs your attention. For example, you’ll learn whether the text’s too small, incompatible plugins, content is too broad compared to screen size, and so on. Do check out mobile responsive design best practices to ensure an all-rounder mobile-optimized website.
Avoid Web Design Mistakes That Hurt Robust Website Maintenance
Web design and maintenance go hand in hand. Your website’s design reflects how your website works, and you don’t want your existing web design to hurt your website’s performance. Thus, ensure to avoid doing the following when it comes to designing your e-commerce website:
- Using stocks images on conversion-driven pages
Today’s online buyers are smart enough to distinguish between authentic images of products from stokes ones. Though Stoke’s images are high-quality, they don’t give insight into how the product looks.
Best websites on the internet use professionally captured images that boost the overall aesthetics of their website.
- Using full-sized high-resolution images
Many websites make the common mistake of using high-resolution full-size images or videos on their web pages. Though such media looks good on the website, they take longer loading time. A recent report by Google shows that if a website page takes over 7 seconds to load fully, the bouncing rate increases by 113%. States day, full-sized images taking over 12 seconds to load caused a 31% decrease in traffic. Thus, it is recommended to crop and compress the images to fit the specific size of your website without increasing time.
- Unclear service messaging
There is no need to explain the importance of web design that is simple and easier for today’s thriving businesses. However, most new marketers create web copy full of industry jargon and sophisticated words to sound professional and credible. However, this practice tends to backfire.
Follow Website Navigation Best Practices
Making it easy for your customers to navigate your e-commerce website improves their customer experience. Below are top website navigation best practices that can enhance your existing site structure and aid in successful web maintenance.
- Make a sitemap that outlines your website pages with primary themes and categories. Pick which main navigation items you want across your primary footer.
- Depending on your customers’ position in their journey to finalizing a purchase, ensure they quickly find needed information. Feature the relevant pages that users need to see.
- Use short and descriptive menu titles whose content search engines and users can predict.
- Use the limited number of menu options in the top navigation.
- Keep a maximum of 2 menu levels or a mega menu that can show all required dropdown menu items.
- Use a primary call to action button at the top of the navigation. Make sure to use a colorful button that pops up the actionable message. CTA placement is one of the important website design tips.
- Remove rarely clicked menu items and move those to the top and front that get the most clicks.
Connect With A Reliable Website Maintenance Company
The whole point of maintaining a website is to increase sales and engage more customers. Your site is critical to your marketing efforts. After all, many businesses rely on their websites for both customers and sales. One thing that you need to keep in mind is that regular website maintenance is the key to your business’s success.
If you have a bigger online presence and a lot of investment, it’s suggested to hire an eCommerce development company that provides effective solutions for needed web maintenance. Digifos Digital Agency is an excellent service provider for all your website maintenance needs. The field experts analyze your site and help you manage web maintenance costs better.
FAQs
1. How often do you need e-commerce website maintenance?
A monthly web maintenance checkup for e-commerce websites should be the standard. However, deep website maintenance needs weekly, monthly, and yearly checkups.
2. How do e-commerce businesses benefit from website maintenance services?
Well-doing e-commerce businesses connect with website maintenance companies and services to take the following advantages of web maintenance:
- High-security of websites all the time.
- Increased customer acquisition and retention.
- Prevention of expensive losses due to website-related issues.
- Timely content updates.
- Helps stay ahead of the competition
- High-quality customer experience
3. Will my Website be “down” while a website maintenance company works on it?
During a routine maintenance process on your website by an eCommerce development company, it won’t go down.
