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Why Maintenance on Your Ecommerce Website is Important

The point of having an ecommerce website is to make sales. So, naturally, failing to keep your website properly maintained can lead to loss of sales. There are several ways that keeping your site fresh will help your sales figures. They include:

1. Reduced cart abandonment.

Let’s say you sell shoes. A customer is on your site and after scrolling through, they add three pairs to their cart. However, a technical glitch causes the basket to empty. Frustrated, the customer leaves the site and chooses a competitor instead.

Keeping on top of an ecommerce website means that you can spot when something is wrong and fix it straight away. Before the customer notices, and you lose out on sales.

Keeping these glitches at bay, then, helps arrest your customer churn. You’ll lose fewer customers to your competitors. Anyone who’s looked into customer churn analysis will tell you how beneficial that can be to your business.

2. Better user experience.

Think about things from a user’s point of view, and how you navigate around any site.

Now consider how your site is laid out. Are new products showing on the landing page? Are contact details easy to find?

It may be that as you have added more products to your pages, things have become jumbled. So, it’s important to maintain a clear website, ensuring navigation is straightforward. It’s all about being clear and organized.

You can link your website maintenance to other business processes here, too. Your product mapping, for instance, can help you plan out where to put products on your site and how to link them together.

Maintaining an ecommerce website ensures a smooth shopping journey and user experience from start to finish. Meaning customers will be much likelier to return.

There are lots of landing page examples across niches that show strong awareness of user experience.

They show some of their most popular products on the above landing page. Then, once clicked on, customers instantly have the option to add to their cart. The product pages aren’t filled, making it very easy for the customer to choose an item and check out.

We’ve talked at length about why it’s important to maintain an ecommerce platform. Now it’s time to put the microscope on how to do it. There are three types of ecommerce website maintenance tasks to focus on. These are:

1. Security maintenance.

Security is the number one reason for website maintenance. Hackers are always searching for ways to try and break into a company’s site. Especially those websites with access to customer details and financial information. Like every ecommerce site.

It doesn’t matter if you have built the website yourself on WordPress or if you have hired professionals in web development to take on the task. Your security needs to be tighter than tight. Regular maintenance checks are what will reveal vulnerabilities and allow you to fix them before they’re found by anyone else.

2. Marketing maintenance.

Digital marketing not only drives people to your site, but it also keeps search engines happy. If your site is doing well on Google, then even more people will end up on your site. So, it’s important to maintain marketing to make sure things are staying fresh and relevant.

This is done by creating new content in the form of SEO articles, messaging, blogs, social media posts, gifs, products, email, videos, and more. Your marketing team can use Google Analytics services to fine-tune your site and content. Such analytics help you understand both your site and its audience. You can discover the elements of your site that work well and those that don’t. You can also explore visitor behavior to get insights into what your website may be missing.

If you’re in the software niche, using a marketing Agency can also help you in this regard. Many can professionally review your site with digital marketing in mind. This would be particularly useful if you have let maintenance slide, as it can show you what to prioritize to arrest your site’s decline.

3. Storefront maintenance.

Just like a brick-and-mortar shop, online storefront maintenance helps improve a customer’s first impression. This is essential as if a customer’s first impression is poor, then you’re scrambling to rebuild their trust before they’ve even looked at your products.

Your virtual storefront shows you are selling what the customer wants.