Whether it’s your car, home, or brick-and-mortar shop, all things require maintenance to keep them running well and properly. The same can be said of websites and social media pages. Without regular maintenance and updates, websites can quickly become outdated or altogether unmanageable. To prevent this, you’ll need to make routine maintenance checks on your business’ e-commerce sites, if possible, even every day.
If you’re unsure where to start, we’ve provided a checklist of what to look out for and take into account when managing your own e-commerce site.
Security checks
One of the primary purposes of conducting regular maintenance, especially online, is, of course, to prevent any security breaches. Online shops, where customers’ sensitive personal and financial information is traded every day, are the most vulnerable to hackers and malware. A regular security check of the entire site’s integrity can help to prevent any cyberattacks from happening.
You want to make sure that all data is encrypted and all channels secure. Set up firewalls, anti-virus software, and regular malware scans. Make sure that your site is PCI compliant as well to protect your customers. If possible, you can have your own network penetration testing to test how easy or difficult it would be for professional hackers to hack into your site and steal your information.
Product and stock updates
You want your e-commerce site to reflect your actual inventory prices and stock as much as possible. Remain in close contact with your manufacturer so that you have a consistent and accurate number of your stock and prices. You want to regularly change this every time you make a sale, even if it’s just one, and even on days when you don’t make a sale, your manufacturer’s stock will usually change daily. It’s important to keep your site up to date to ensure that you’re presenting your customers with accurate information.
Other than stock, you should also update store prices, and that includes discounts and promotions. If you’re having a sale on selected items, let your customers know. Advertise it on your site and reflect the price drop on those items’ respective pages. You also want to update product descriptions from time to time if changes have been made to a design, product dimension, or material.
Customer service
Automating answers for frequently asked questions can usually get this process done for you and save you some time. But for particular queries, you’ll need to have someone on hand to answer and entertain these questions every day. You don’t want to keep your customers waiting. At the very least, you should reply to them within the day and during regular business hours, meaning not late at night when they’re probably already asleep.
It increases customer satisfaction and retention, and overall, it’s just good customer service. You can’t go wrong with that.
Data collection and analysis
New data gets made every time someone new accesses your site from a new channel or every time a customer makes a new purchase. If you don’t update your data, you’ll be left with old analytics and metrics that are either outdated.
Data is crucial to any business, especially to marketing your business. You want to review all new data that gets recorded and make sure that it’s all up to date. Then, you want to compile all this data and store it somewhere for your marketing team to access and assess.
Additionally, you might need to assess and summarize the data yourself. But with the help of the right software, you won’t even need to do it all by hand anymore. But even this software needs to be maintained regularly to keep it running smoothly.
Marketing
The market changes every day, so you need to change up your marketing strategies now and again. Just as different people have different needs, different marketing strategies work for different people. You want to update your landing pages with relevant content, such as a new sale or a new in-store product, and perform SEO and other online marketing processes. This could also include email, social media, and content marketing. You can rely on a marketing team for this or outsource it to third-party companies.
Backups
Accidents and security breaches can happen at any moment, especially if you haven’t been looking at your site’s overall security. As such, to be on the safe side, you want to have a backup of all your site’s data. You can automate data backup using cloud software or manually do it yourself if internet breaches still worry you. Either way, make sure that necessary data is stored in a safe backup file so that you have something to fall back on if you ever encounter a security breach.
You can never be too careful when it comes to the safety, security, and overall reputation of your e-commerce business. Regular maintenance can help to keep your business running safely and smoothly, improve your customer’s trust in your business, and ensure their continued patronage.
