Creating a visually appealing design for your website can help you get the attention of your target audience. However, a great design won’t last forever if you don’t regularly clean and maintain it. When running an eCommerce website, you need to stay on top of the latest trends to provide your customers with an experience that constantly engages them and pushes them to buy your products or services.
If you manage a brick-and-mortar store, you likely understand the importance of performing routine maintenance to ensure everything continues to run smoothly. The same is true of your eCommerce website. If you clean and maintain the site regularly, you’ll benefit from enhanced security, higher sales, and an improved user experience. In this guide, you’ll learn how to clean eCommerce website to keep your customers satisfied.
Benefits of a Clean eCommerce Website
From better security to higher rankings on search engines like Google, there are many reasons why you should clean your eCommerce website.
Enhanced Security
By maintaining a safe and secure website, your customers will have the confidence they need to purchase items. They’ll trust that their credit card info will remain secure after they enter it. If your eCommerce storefront is hacked, many of your customers will lose trust in your ability to keep their transactions secure. If your customers trust you, they’ll continue to shop on your website. Maintaining a secure shopping environment is only possible if you regularly clean your website.
Improved User Experience
When you focus on maintaining your eCommerce website, you can provide your visitors with easy navigation and quick access to products. If a user enters your website with a specific product in mind, they’ll be able to navigate to it quickly. A clean website can load in a couple of seconds, which should keep bounce rates low. It’s also important that you deliver updated and relevant content that keeps your customers informed and encourages them to make additional purchases.
Increased Sales
The modern customer demands a smooth checkout process. If a user experiences an error when purchasing a product, they might not come back. Issues during the checkout process can decrease consumer confidence in the quality of your website and its security.
By regularly maintaining your website, you can ensure that your links take users where they need to go and that the checkout experience is seamless. You can also keep accurate inventory numbers, which makes it easier for you to identify when you need to restock specific items.
Better Search Engine Rankings
Google has always ranked websites higher in search results if they contain updated and new content. By writing consistent blog posts and updating your product pages often, Google will label you as an expert in your industry. Keep in mind that Google also values working links, user experience, and website performance when ranking pages. Higher search engine rankings lead to more revenue and site visitors.
Consequences of Neglecting Website Cleanliness
If you neglect website cleanliness, you can damage your brand and push customers away for good.
Security Risks
Any vulnerabilities and security threats on your website can be exploited directly by hackers. If you don’t maintain your website regularly, security issues can develop and grow. If your website is shut down temporarily because of successful hacking attempts, you could lose customer data, sales, and your reputation.
Customer Frustration
Websites with slow loading times and broken links are frustrating to use. When customers enter your website and deal with these issues, they might look for a better website that offers a similar product. When frustration builds, customers can become unhappy and buy fewer products.
Reduced Traffic
If your website contains broken links, outdated content, or slow loading times, you may not bring in as much traffic. In this scenario, your site may drop in search engine rankings, which can hurt your overall visibility.
12-Step eCommerce Cleaning Checklist
Adhere to the following checklist to maintain your website and keep it in great condition.
Update WordPress, Themes, and Plugins
Your WordPress, plugins, and themes should be updated regularly to effectively patch out any security vulnerabilities and bugs that arise. The latest versions of plugins and WordPress also provide new functionality. If you don’t fix the security issues on your site, customer data may be at risk.
While you can manually update all your plugins, it’s a good idea to automate them with a software solution that offers this functionality. When manually updating these plugins, create backups beforehand.
Back Up Your Store Regularly
Even if you automate WordPress and plugin updates, you still need to back up your store regularly. During the day, you’ll likely receive numerous orders. The information you gather from these orders must be backed up in real-time, which reduces the potential for data loss if a hack occurs.
If you obtain a real-time backup plugin for your website, make sure it includes the database, plugins, and content. Multiple copies of each file should be stored on different servers.
Monitor and Analyze Analytics
By monitoring your website’s performance, you can use analytics to identify problem areas. For example, the WordPress dashboard in WooCommerce should give you access to an “Analytics” tab. From here, you can view sales data, traffic volume, and bounce rates.
Monitoring the traffic volume metric is necessary to determine when you need to update and maintain your website. If a specific page is experiencing a significant dip in overall traffic volume, it’s possible that a link is broken or a button isn’t working.
When reviewing your website, look at the products and posts that are most popular. This content should be included in your marketing efforts. It will also inform you of the types of content your target audience wants to see.
Maintain Site Security
Cyberattacks can render your website unusable, which is why you need to constantly update your security. A simple way to accomplish this goal is by installing a powerful WordPress security plugin. If you don’t use WordPress, it’s a good idea to purchase security software that offers features like malware scanning and anti-spam protection.
Monitor Site Uptime
You won’t be able to monitor your eCommerce website 24/7. However, some security software solutions offer downtime monitoring, which ensures you receive alerts immediately after your website goes down. You can also put together a security team to perform continuous monitoring.
Check for Broken Links
Even a single broken link can negatively impact the user experience that your customers have. It can also affect your search rankings. Outbound links commonly break when websites move to new domains or remove posts. You can find and fix broken links with tools like Google Search Console or SEMrush. Ahrefs also provides a Broken Link Checker. Remove broken links immediately after you detect them.
Optimize Site Speed
Regularly test your website speeds and loading times to ensure your customers remain satisfied. You can effectively improve bad load times by enabling browser caching, minifying scripts, and optimizing images. You can also integrate a content delivery network (CDN) into your website to speed things up.
Test the Checkout Process Regularly
As mentioned previously, customers should always have access to a smooth checkout process. Test the checkout process after updating your theme, plugins, or WordPress. Even if you don’t make changes to your site, it’s recommended that you review the checkout functionality at least once or twice every month.
Update FAQs and Customer Information
When you make updates to your products, features, store policies, or shipping information, it’s important that you also alter the information that references these items on your customer knowledge base or FAQ page. If you remove a product from circulation but don’t update the FAQ, customers may become confused when they can’t find the item they’re searching for.
Keep Inventory Accurate
Your inventory must also be kept accurate to avoid selling too much or not having enough items in stock. However, it’s best to avoid manually updating your inventory. You can automate inventory updates with product management software.
Square is an effective WooCommerce solution that allows you to sync your eCommerce platform with your brick-and-mortar store. If you’re using WooCommerce, you should also enable the “low stock” notification to identify when you should order new products.
Update Product SKUs and Descriptions
When you update your products, these changes should be reflected in all areas of your website. Pay close attention to product descriptions, shipping details, FAQs, and SKUs. Consider using new photographs if the changes are significant.
Create a Maintenance Schedule
To make sure you regularly clean and maintain your website, create a comprehensive maintenance schedule with a calendar app, customer relationship management (CRM) tool or project management software. These solutions will update you when recurring tasks need to be done.
Conclusion
Whether you run a small eCommerce store or a major online retailer, it’s crucial that you clean and maintain your website regularly. If you don’t consistently update your website, you may encounter serious security risks, bad loading times, and broken links. These issues can hurt consumer confidence in your brand, which is why a structured maintenance schedule is needed. Implement this checklist for long-term eCommerce success.
