5 Time-Tested Tips to Keep Your E-Commerce Site Running Smoothly

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Online stores are some of the most demanding websites in terms of development and maintenance.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Apart from the truckloads of high-quality product images, there are dozens of other site components you need to put together to keep your e-commerce site up and running, from custom codes to integrations with third-party services.

Keep in mind that any website — not just online stores — depend on performance to effectively engage and convert visitors.

If your e-commerce site has been getting wonky lately, then it’s high time you perform proper maintenance and optimization strategies.

Here is a list of proven strategies that will get you started:

 

1. Compress Your Images

Beautiful images that put your products in the best light are must-haves in any online store.

Unfortunately, they can drastically hurt performance if you just add them willy-nilly — unoptimized and bloated in terms of file size.

Keep in mind that large web assets like high-resolution images will take up a lot of bandwidth, especially if they are crammed together into a single page. This, in turn, leads to longer load times, which may cause you to lose roughly half of your potential customers in desktops and mobile devices.

According to statistics, 53% of mobile users would abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load — 40% if they are browsing on a desktop.

A quick fix is to utilize a lossless compression tool that’s built for the specific platform you’re using. WordPress, for example, has WP Smush, whereas Shopify has Crush.pics and Image Optimizer.

2. Use a Content Delivery Network

One of the beauties of e-commerce is that you can easily break the distance barrier and cater to the international audience with just one site.

However, a visitor’s physical distance between them and your host’s server results in higher latency, which would, in turn, translate to a slower site.

A Content Delivery Network or CDN will help you get around this problem by leveraging a network of globally-distributed proxy servers.

For example, let’s say you have customers in Australia who are trying to access your e-commerce site. A CDN can reduce latency by utilizing a proxy server in Sydney to deliver cached website data.

(Image Source: Incapsula)

3. Prioritize Mobile Performance

Data from Statista show that mobile users now make up a bigger share of the global internet traffic than desktop users.

Despite this, a lot of e-commerce entrepreneurs, particularly those who lack experience and a dedicated web development team, focus too much on the desktop version of their website.

You can’t blame them, though. After all, website platforms like Shopify, Joomla, BigCommerce, and WordPress are best-used on a desktop environment — it’s not hard for developers to be tunnel-visioned on the desktop experience.

The good news is, there are a handful of online tools out there that can help your e-commerce website run smoothly on mobile devices.

Using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a step in the right direction. It works by automatically detect the exact issues that compromise the experience of your mobile users.

Certain platforms also have specific third-party apps that you can integrate in order to boost the mobile experience in a snap. Joomla, for example, has paGo Commerce — an enterprise software that lets you develop streamlined buying experiences on any device.

4. Check Your Cybersecurity

In the e-commerce world, there are two things you should always keep an eye out for: overzealous competitors and cyber attacks.

This is a no-brainer even to website owners who are absolutely new in the world of e-commerce.

If you want to keep your brand afloat, you need to do everything in your power to stay ahead of your competition. At the same time, you must be aware of all the different types of cyber attacks, how they can affect your business, and what you ought to do about them.

Distributed Denial of Service or DDoS attacks, for instance, may cause your website to crash and put your income to a grinding halt.

Sure, a CDN should definitely help you mitigate the impact of such attacks. But what about malware infections, SQL injections, or even internal coding mistakes?

The cold hard truth is, no one — not even the biggest of businesses — can truly stop all cyber attacks from taking place and affecting their revenue. What you can do is lessen the damage and hasten the recovery by regularly backing up important website data.

Just like image optimization, there are several backup tools tailored to each platform. Even hosting companies like GoDaddy and HostGator have backup features that can keep your website’s data and stability secure.

5. Track Analytics

Not all maintenance issues must have something to do with a website’s performance.

As an e-commerce business, you need to look at every single pocket of opportunity to improve. Your website’s content, for example, is directly tied to several metrics that can dictate profitability, like pageviews, bounce rate, session duration, and so on.

With a tool like Google Analytics in hand, you can have a crystal-clear view on the connection between these metrics and every single page on your website. It could single-handedly transform your digital marketing strategy by showing you what particular type content works and how the audience reacts.

Google Analytics even goes as far as letting you track your e-commerce conversions. You just need to insert a snippet of code into your online store to track data such as the times of purchase, average sale value, billing locations, and so on.

Of course, there are also built-in analytics features found in most e-commerce platforms. Most of them, however, aren’t as robust as Google Analytics in terms of the data you can unearth.

 

Conclusion

E-commerce can be a nasty business, but only for those who are ill-prepared and have poor discipline when it comes to maintenance.

With the strategies above, you’re more than sure to keep your e-commerce productivity in high gear. Just remember to take one step at a time and execute everything each strategy with utmost care.

Do you think we missed a crucial strategy for keeping an e-commerce website in top shape? If so, feel free to comment about it below!

 

Author: Sean Coleman

Editor: Proper Guide

 

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