Website maintenance is one of the biggest keys to running any successful website. When we talk about “website maintenance”, we are referring to the things you do to keep your website working correctly and performing well.

In this article, we are going to be looking at some of the specific website maintenance requirements for e-commerce websites and online storefronts. Before we get into the specifics though, let’s start by looking at what website maintenance is in a more general sense, and why it is important.

Website maintenance is one of the best ways to offer your website’s visitors the best possible user experience. It can also help to reduce the risk of website outages, technical issues, and security breaches.

Typically, website maintenance is undertaken by web developers or a website development company. Some aspects of web maintenance may also be undertaken by web design professionals or marketing teams.

Generally speaking, maintaining a website involves things like:

• Performing testing to check the overall functioning of your website
• Implementing security features, and fixing any vulnerabilities and issues
• Making SEO updates to maintain your website’s search engine ranking
• Improving page loading speed and responsiveness, and making other updates to improve the user experience
• Keeping plug-ins up-to-date and secure, and removing any broken ones
• Creating new reCAPTCHAs to reduce spam
• Installing software updates
• Renewing SSL certificates
• Making regular back-ups of your digital data
• Completing content updates (for example, adding updated content, amending current content, or removing content that is irrelevant or outdated)
• Monitoring and reporting on performance, and making adjustments to your website strategy where necessary
• Performing emergency technical support (for example, if your website glitches, goes down, or is hacked)
• Digital marketing or social media maintenance tasks

A lot of the time, these aspects of website maintenance will apply to most websites. For example, all websites will benefit from regularly testing their overall functioning, improving their user experience, and checking for and fixing any security issues.

Sometimes though, there are some additional maintenance requirements that apply to certain types of websites – for example, e-commerce sites and online stores. These will apply on top of the general website maintenance tasks that we discussed above.

Some types of e-commerce website maintenance tasks include:

• Updating your landing pages and product pages to reflect your current product and service offerings
• Adding new products and pages
• Ensuring your website accurately reflects your current inventory
• Adding new photos and other new pieces of content
• Optimising site navigation to make the purchasing journey as seamless as possible for your customers
• Fixing glitches and technical errors (one of the top reasons that people abandon their shopping carts!)
• Conducting A/B testing to identify which version of a particular digital asset resonates best with your customers

All of these things play an important role in the maintenance of e-commerce stores.

It is important to maintain your e-commerce shopfront to keep your conversion rates as high as possible. The best way to do this is by making your site as user-friendly as possible, and fixing any issues that might prevent you from turning leads into sales.

In fact, research shows that technical errors and a confusing user experience are both major causes of shopping cart abandonment (i.e. where your customer adds items to their cart, but leaves without actually making a purchase).

Website maintenance for e-commerce sites is just one of the services we offer at Tomedia. Click here to find out more about how we can help you with maintaining your e-commerce website.