One of the essential steps to running a successful e-commerce business is to perform regular website maintenance. Poor website maintenance can result in data breaches, terrible customer experiences, and loss of sales.
WooCommerce Maintenance Checklists
This blog has shared 7 WooCommerce maintenance checklists to keep your online store in the best shape. It will help you maximize your revenue.
1. Run Security Scans
Apart from regular updates, keep a close eye on malware. They are malicious software like worms, viruses, advanced persistent threats (APTs), and ransomware. In 2020, Verizon Data Breach Investigations revealed that 17% of data breaches were caused by malware.
Malware can disrupt your operations completely, bringing your business to a standstill for days. So, use a security plugin as a component for your WooCommerce maintenance. It will help protect your business, preventing loss of profits, productivity, and reputational damage.
2. Fix Broken Links
Broken links can damage your website’s SEO and frustrate consumers. They will head over to your competitors to get what they were looking for from your site. They will then head over to your competitors to get what they were looking for. All this will hurt your business.
Set up redirects when a page is no longer published. It will help you in avoiding 404 errors. Although it is easier to control with internal links, for external ones, make it a part of the monthly WooCommerce maintenance plan to get your web pages scanned for broken links. Tools like W3C Link Checker and Google Search Console can also help you.
Another method is to limit broken external links by only backlinking to reputable sites. Don’t be too granular when backlinking. For example, linking to a seasonal products page versus the seasonal page itself will increase the chance of getting a broken link. It is because there is a chance that specific product pages may get changed or deleted if the product gets discontinued or is no longer available. You can contact our website maintenance company to fix broken links.
3. Perform Regular Backups
Backing up your data is one of the best practices during WooCommerce maintenance. Incidents like server crashes, hard drive corruption, or cyber attack can wreck your business. So, up-to-date backups will help you restore your business operations. No information will be lost. You can perform data backup yourself through an online plugin. Remember, prevention is better than cure.
4. Optimize For Search Engines
SEO is about utilizing best practices when creating a website. It will impact the search result placement of your site. Optimized web pages will help your website rank higher on Google, affecting traffic and potential conversions.
So, what are the best practices for SEO? Well, it could be using industry and branded keywords throughout the copy. The frequency of these keywords will depend on the amount of copy on the page. Although, the best practice is to use a variation of the keywords once every 100 words, while secondary ones should get used once every 200 words. Our Chicago SEO Company can help you in optimizing your website.
Search engines also include the amount of copy on a page while indexing. So, providing enough copy on the website will impact the SEO ranking. Your business should monitor website load times and broken link errors when performing WooCommerce maintenance. Both can negatively impact your website’s SEO score.
5. Conduct Site Speed Tests
Slow load times are a significant reason behind poor user experience and high bounce rates. Approximately 40% of customers will abandon your website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Conduct website speed tests monthly to determine problem areas and resolve them accordingly. Compress and optimize images on your web pages to reduce the risk of longer load times. Also, remove unused plugins and minify the website coding.
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6. Examine Website Functionality
Test your website functionality to ensure that everything is working correctly. Go through the entire buying process and identify missed errors. It will help you boost website performance and provide a better user experience, thus bringing in more sales.
Third-party validator tools like W3C Markup Validation Service and CSS Validation Service will help you find flaws and repair your website. It automates the entire process.
These tools are excellent for businesses with multiple pages looking for a more efficient way to verify the website’s functionality.
7. Update Your Sitemap
A sitemap is a list of web pages within a domain. They are essential in helping search engines navigate your website, impacting your overall rankings on SERPs. So, continually update your sitemap during the WooCommerce maintenance process. Here are the five steps to keep the sitemap updated. First, Generate your sitemap file. Use a sitemap generator tool and follow these instructions:
- Upload your sitemap to the websites root server
- Ensure the sitemap is in the servers root folder
- Verify your sitemap file is live
- Resubmit your site, which now includes your updated sitemap, to Bing and Google
Conclusion
It is essential to perform regular website maintenance if you want your online business to flourish. This WooCommerce maintenance checklist will help you run a healthy and smooth website optimized for search results and user experience.
If you need more help, contact us to optimize your WooCommerce SEO services. We are a leading eCommerce website maintenance company in the USA with an experienced team of eCommerce developers.
You can contact us through our Contact Us form regarding your woocommerce SEO agency needs, and we will get back to you shortly.