If you don’t maintain your ecommerce website, you are leaving yourself open to hackers. You may also let your site slip down Google rankings, and risk the search engine assuming you are a dodgy website. All of those issues mean you will lose customers.
When it comes to website maintenance, there are various things you can focus on. More often than not people only fix their website or focus on it during an emergency. This is to say most people take care of their website when it either gets hacked, it is so buggy, it is not usable or they desperately need some information updated. Our goal is to help you avoid this situation.
Website maintenance may seem like a hefty job, but with regular updates, it’s not as daunting as it appears. It’s essential to stay on top of your website management. A better user experience means more sales.
You also need to decide if you want to use your staff to do the required maintenance, or if you want to hire freelancers or specialist teams. Keeping up to date with your ecommerce website maintenance keeps you ahead of the competition and tells customers that you are worth visiting.
According to Forbes, online store spending has increased by 77% in May 2020 and this trend is supposed to continue in the upcoming years. The number of digital shoppers in the USA is likely to reach more than 230 million by 2021. However, there are thousands of e-commerce websites and all of them are trying to attract the target customers. Thus, creating a responsive and user-friendly shopping portal that is filled with the latest products is not enough. These websites need routine maintenance to deliver the best possible user experience.
After the Coronavirus pandemic pushed us all to stay inside for months on end, the popularity of ecommerce has exploded. In May 2020, online store spending was up by 77% on previous years, says Forbes. And this trend is only set to continue.
Yet, it’s not enough for a business to simply think about website design at the outset, fill the site full of new products, and expect the rest to take its course. Like anything that you do, an ecommerce website needs ongoing maintenance.
Think of it as moving into a new house. At first, everything is shiny and clean. After a while though, dirt builds up, the washing machine isn’t quite doing its job, and the wardrobe door won’t shut properly.
But because you care for the house, you clean it, you replace the washing machine, and you fix the door. You maintain it.
Having an ecommerce website is much like this. You need to keep up the ecommerce maintenance on the site to make sure you have the best online presence possible. Rehabilitate products where needed and fix any problems that may occur. Give people not just a good, but a big impression as to who you are, whether you are a fashion enterprise or a B2B events development company.
Maintaining your ecommerce website isn’t just about changing the color scheme or marking things as ‘out of stock’. It’s about establishing great content, keeping it safe from hackers, and making sure the marketing team is doing its job.
This guide will take you through why all this is so important and what you can do to make sure you are maintaining your ecommerce site.
Benefits Of Ecommerce Website Maintenance
1) Reduced Cart Abandonment
Abandonment is a term that is generally used in ecommerce to describe a particular behavior of a website user in which the user abandons a webpage without finishing the desired task.
For example, a visitor may add some items to the shopping cart, However, a technical barrier causes the basket to empty. Frustrated, the customer leaves the site and chooses a competitor instead.
It is possible to reduce the frequency of shopping-cart abandonment through proper maintenance of an e-commerce website. It enables you to spot when something is wrong and fix it straight away before it is noticed by a visitor.
2) Better User Experience
Maintaining an ecommerce website ensures a smooth shopping journey and user experience from start to finish. Meaning customers will be much likelier to return.
If you want to provide the best experience to the users, then you have to examine the value of every component on the ecommerce portal from their point of view. You may ask yourself the following questions.
• Can you effortlessly navigate around the e-commerce portal?
• Are new products being shown on the landing page?
•It is possible to find the contact details, easily?
It is important to keep everything organized on an ecommerce portal so that users can easily find the products of their choice. So, it’s important to maintain a clear website, ensuring navigation is straightforward. You can guarantee a smooth user experience as well as the shopping journey at every point of the ecommerce shopping portal through adequate maintenance. You may use ‘Product Mapping’ to learn where to put the products on a website and how to link all products.
3 ) Software Updates
It is important to routinely update the software program (used to build an ecommerce portal) to ensure ultimate online security and smooth performance. For example,
If the e-commerce website has been built on WordPress, then you have to update the main software, themes, and plugins routinely (WordPress releases at least one official update per month).
You have to keep the software program updated at regular intervals irrespective of its type. However, it is necessary to maintain a back-up of every essential feature before updating the software.
4) Fresh Content
To keep updated content on the ecommerce portal, you have to ensure a better user experience. You can keep updated content through routine maintenance of an ecommerce website. You may lose the viewers if they have no updated information to read or to watch on a video when visiting the website. It sends a wrong message to the potential as well as current customers. They may believe that the business is not going on successfully, or it does not get your attention.
5) Advantage Of Using Latest Features
Website technology is growing at a quick pace and you may take advantage of the latest technology through website maintenance. For example,
• 53% of the total global population uses social media. It has been found that social media drives 31% of the referral traffic. You may add some latest features to your website to integrate the ecommerce platform to social media and to have a slice of the aforementioned referral traffic.
• You may even add new technological features to expand the security of ecommerce platforms. You may invest in an SSL certificate to boost a website’s security, as it can encrypt the communications and guarantee the security of the customer’s details.
What Can Happen If You Don’t Maintain Your Ecommerce Website?
Maintaining your ecommerce website is necessary. Not doing so can affect you to lose revenue. Worse yet, in extreme scenarios, poor maintenance may cause your business to shut down. Here are a few issues that may occur if you don’t care for your ecommerce platforms.
- More Prone To Hackers
If you don’t have the right security in place, not just your site, but your company as a whole is at risk. Losing precious data, after all, can cause fatal damage to a brand’s reputation. You can keep the security features updated through routine eCommerce website maintenance and can avoid security breaches.
- Website May Fail To Future Updates
Every website requires to remain updated concerning the basic web standards, coding, and languages; otherwise, a website may fail when being updated in the future. CSS and HTML codes change every year and if your site was developed some time ago, it’s possibly carrying around a lot of codes that will be slowing it down.
3) May Become Suspicious To Web Browsers
The web-browsers may consider your website to be a suspicious website if it has not been properly built or maintained and has inappropriate security features. This means that they think you’re a ‘phishing’ site and web browsers will flag you. What this means is that your site is inadequately set up and has poor security. From a business standpoint, your ecommerce platform will receive less online traffic and hence, fewer sales.
4) Irregular Updates May Decrease Google Rankings
If your website looks unappealing on the first click, people will not use it. Similarly, if you aren’t posting the right content, it will affect the search engine optimization (SEO) of your site.
Putting together regular SEO articles lowers your chance of falling down the Google ranks. Maintaining your site, and refreshing content help keep your SEO on point.
5) Site Traffic Will Slow Down
A poorly maintained website won’t get as much traffic. Pages, links, or other site elements that don’t work are noticed by both Google and visitors. The latter will start avoiding your pages, and the former’s ranking of them will respond accordingly.
Falling traffic affected by poor site maintenance can be a vicious cycle. This decline cannot be easily arrested. However, it is possible to prevent this issue through routine maintenance.
3 Types Of Ecommerce Website Maintenance
There are three types of ecommerce website maintenance tasks to focus on. These are:
1). Security maintenance:
The most important thing for ecommerce website maintenance is security.
Hackers are always searching for directions to try and break into a company’s site. Especially those websites with access to customer details and financial information. Like every eCommerce site.
Therefore, the main reason for the maintenance of an ecommerce website is to provide it with improved security. It allows you to find out the vulnerabilities of your website’s security and fix them before being found by the hackers.
2) Marketing Maintenance:
Another type of ecommerce website maintenance is marketing maintenance, as digital marketing can increase online traffic by driving people to a website whilst boosting a website’s SERP.
Through marketing maintenance, your ecommerce website will have updated content in various forms (products, blogs, SEO articles, social media posts, e-mails, GIF, messaging, videos, etc.).
You can also explore the behavior of the visitors to your ecommerce platform using a web-analytics service and will find out what is missing on an ecommerce platform.
3) Storefront Maintenance:
The success of your ecommerce website mostly depends upon a good first impression and you can achieve this goal through storefront maintenance. The visitors to your website may leave the website without looking at the products if they are dissatisfied with the first impression. Hence, you will lose forthcoming customers and you can avoid this risk through storefront maintenance.
Ecommerce Maintenance Costs:
The cost of properly maintaining an ecommerce website depends upon numerous factors such as business size, type of platform, conversion rate, back-up and migration services, etc. Whether you are maintaining a home, a car, or a website, these things cost money. The average cost of maintenance for ecommerce websites of varying sizes is as follows.
Small-Size Ecommerce Website (Around $4k-$50k sale per year):
• Backups/Migrations – free (based upon the platform’s type)
• SSL certificates – free
• Security – free
• The hosting costs $11.95
• Domain registration and renewal – $1.25 per month (based upon the selected site)
• Additional plugins – $10
Medium-Size Ecommerce Website (Around $10k-$120k sale per year):
• SSL certificates – free
• Domain registration/renewal cost -$1.25
• Hosting costs – $19.95
• Cost of backups/migrations – $7.40
• Website plugins – $20
• Security – $17
Large Ecommerce Website (around $40k-$500k sale per year):
• SSL certificates – free
• Domain registration/renewal cost-$1.25
• Hosting costs – $200
• Cost of backups/migrations – free (based upon the platform)
• Security – $25
• Website plugins – $40
Options for Website Maintenance:
The best option for the maintenance of your ecommerce website depends upon your unique requirements. You may retain the service of a freelancer or hire a team of ecommerce professionals or consultants for this task. You may even use the in-house marketing team for the ecommerce website maintenance.
Conclusion
If you continuously update an ecommerce website with routine maintenance, then you can stay ahead of the competitors, by offering the best user experience to your target audience, telling customers that you are worth visiting. The task of maintaining a website also becomes simpler with routine maintenance.