Easy-to-Implement Website Maintenance Tips for Ecommerce Stores

A lot of our clients realize brick and mortar stores are slowly going away in this country and want to become a part of the ever growing online E commerce world. The exposure to your products increases significantly when you take them online, but so does not only the competition, but also the security threats that go along with an insecure website that offers online purchases.

Once you complete the initial development of a E commerce shopping cart website, there are several very important maintenance to-do’s monthly.

Not only do you have to make sure that all plugins are updated for security reasons, your actual version of Woo commerce must be updated immediately when a new version comes out to ensure the site is secure.

In order to keep the cart running smoothly, it’s important to maintain and monitor a site for any possible issues, which could affect both the sites usability and it’s profitability. Remember, your clients sensitive data like shipping address and other personal information are stored in the database of the E store, if compromised, you can be liable.

For merchants who run a E commerce business, 100% of sales comes from the website, which means that even a small problem can significantly affect profitability.

To improve your client’s profit and avoid any issues, consider the following  to maintain a healthy E commerce site for your clients:

Always Backup Your Woo commerce Store
Regularly backing up a website should be common practice anyway, but many people are not backing up their website daily, weekly or even monthly. This is even more important for online store owners due to the amount of time it has taken to load all of your products into the site. With an online store it is nearly impossible to back up the store information too often, our basic rules is if anything has changed in the site, back it up. If possible, backing up an E commerce website should take place at least once a week. There are a bunch of WordPress plugins that are free and will back up an entire site with a coule simple clicks, our favorite is BackupGuard.

Always Update
Along with backing up Woo commerce website, it is just as important to update all of the WooCommerce & WordPRess plugins as well as the active website theme or child theme and the WordPress core software version. This not only ensures the latest versions of the software is running, but it also ensures maximum security is in place. Most of the updates are usually security specific and are released as new exploits/viruses are discovered. Delaying or not doing these updates as soon as they become available put E commerce website in a vulnerable position to be hacked.

Manage Your Store Information
Along with updating the current software version running the online store, it is just as important to regularly update product information and inventory. This is particularly true for WooCommerce stores that deal primarily or entirely with physical or tangible products, not electronic downloads like music or other media for sale online. By keeping this information up to date ensures a store owners is able to provide their customers with the best service possible and hopefully keeps them coming back for repeat purchases. It is important to not only update pricing but also to remove items that are no longer being sold.

Nothing is worse or more unprofessional than folllowing up with a buyer from your site to tell them you cannot fulfill their order since the item is not in stock. That is like going to a restaurant ordering the special of the night since the waiter was pushing it on you and then the waitor comes back to the table to let you know the special has been sold out. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to order something from an online store only to realize the item is no longer available but wasn’t removed from the online store.

Pay Attention to Uptime
It may seem obvious but customers can only buy items from a WooCommerce store when the website is running fast and is online 24/7. The host we use guarantees a 99.9% uptime or your money back. Monitoring uptime is the only way to ensure a website is available to customers 24/7. There are a number of easy to use website uptime monitoring plugins for WordPress.If your site goes down frequently, get a new host.

Strongly Consider Professional Maintenance Services
Keeping an online store up to date is not a one-time thing. It is something that has be done regularly. Once a WooCommerce is profitable, it may be worth the price to hire a professional website maintenance service.

We maintain both the WordPress software of the website as well as the hosting server, shopping cart add-ons. This type of service does guarantee your site runs smoothly and is secure at all times for all customers. It also allows store owners to focus on more important aspects like marketing the site and driving buyers to the site.

Ofcourse maintenance does not end at just updates, there is a lot more work to be done. You have to run backups, run security checks, do product inventory updates, handle out of stock products and fix any broken links.

Woo Commerce maintenance is not a one time event monthly. You’ll have to dedicate time and effort to complete the minimum needed tasks on a regular basis, usually weekly.

And if you’d rather do it yourself rather than spend this time on growing your business, there are plenty of tutorials online to teach you how to do it. If not, you can always hand over the website maintenance over to professionals and ensure it is done right.

Letting Woo Commerce maintenance specialists handle all security aspects of your site can result in long term success with your online sales.

At Internet Solutions For Less, we understand how important it is to keep a website functional, safe and secure while also realizing that each website has exclusive needs. All of our website maintenance services can also be customized according to your specific needs.

With our affordable custom maintenance options, you can have a fresh website presence, better connect with your visitors and transform your online E commerce business to 100% secure.