How to Perform E-Commerce Website Maintenance

WordPress websites require regular maintenance in order to run smoothly. The power and customization and no-code features only work well if the site is healthy. All sites need maintenance but, it’s important to remember that if your site is san e-commerce store, you’ll need to schedule some special and specific e-commerce website maintenance tasks as well. 

Maintaining your e-commerce site provides you with the following benefits:

• Increased security – When you’re consistently monitoring and improving your site, the site is less vulnerable to hacks, bots, conflicts, and crashes. 
• A better user experience – If your site isn’t maintained, bugs and conflicts can make using the site harder for your customers. 
• Stronger search engine rankings – Google likes to see and prefers to rank sites that are up to date, full of fresh new content, and consistently improving.
• More uptime – Most causes of downtime can be prevented with standard website maintenance tasks. 
• More customers, conversions, and sales – When online shopping, a smooth experience is key. If a website is buggy, not only is it hard to use but customers may view the site as untrustworthy. Earn trust and sales by keeping your site in tip-top shape. 

Shoppers focus primarily on three essential factors when shopping online: shipping, security, and price. 58% of shoppers say fast and reliable shipping is the biggest factor when it comes to clicking “buy.” 48% prioritize payment methods and options, and 46.8% are focused on value, pricing, and discounts. (https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/ecommerce-statistics) These are focuses unique to e-commerce sites, and so your maintenance plan needs to prioritize them too.

How is E-Commerce Website Maintenance Different From Regular Website Maintenance?

Understanding why and how to maintain WordPress sites is crucial. There are certain tasks that are crucial for every WordPress website maintenance task list. Depending on your website, certain website maintenance tasks can shift and change. 

With ecommerce sites, standard maintenance isn’t enough. With a shop site, there is:

• A higher focus on sales
• A more complex environment and infrastructure
• Unique security and data concerns 
• Specific tools and plugins to manage

E-commerce maintenance steps need to be performed on top of the standard ones in order to make sure your shop runs at peak performance. 

Check out our article on WordPress website maintenance to brush up on the basics before moving on.

How to Maintain Your WordPress E-commerce Website

On top of the standard checklist of maintenance tasks, here are the steps you should include – or provide special focus on – to tailor your process for a shop environment. 

Check and Test Site Backups

Backups are more important than you may realize when it comes to e-commerce website maintenance. We often deprioritize them until something happens and we absolutely need them to save the day. 

You should be taking website file and database backups with increased frequency. Some shops will take a backup after every single sale. At minimum, if you have a fairly high volume shop, you should be taking daily backups. 

Not only that, but on a regular basis you should test your backups. Review them to make sure that they’re running as expected. You may even want to test restoring a backup. Make sure your team is trained on how to complete that process. That way if something goes wrong, you’re not scrambling to restore the site, wasting time, and losing sales.

Review Your Site on Mobile Devices

It’s estimated that in 2025, 59% of total retail ecommerce sales will be conducted on mobile devices. As of 2024, 30% of the digital world – or 1.65 billion people, shop online using their phones. 

What do all these numbers mean to you? There’s a lot of competition when it comes to online shopping. Users shop on their phones so much that they have certain expectations. They feel comfortable jumping from website to website in order to find the experience they want. 

So that means your mobile experience needs to be absolutely seamless. 

Test your shop on mobile devices regularly in order to find weak points, glitches, or broken design elements. Ask yourself just how easy it is for people to use your site on a small screen.

Review Speed and Uptime Performance 

Studies show that half of online purchases take place within half an hour of someone landing on the site. Additional research proves that if a site takes more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of users click away in search of a speedier experience. 

This means that if your site is slow, you’re losing sales. Simple as that. 

Methods to keep a store running smoothly could include:

• Optimizing shop product images and video
• Utilizing more aggressive caching tools
• Using a CSN to deliver static content

Run speed and uptime tests on a regular basis. If your shop pages are loading slowly, dive deep into the test results to immediately repair or address any issues. If you’re noticing your site experiencing a lot of downtime, consider changing hosting providers or increasing the resources on your plan. 

Test All Sides of Your Store 

On a regular basis, do a virtual walk-through of your store. 

With a physical storefront, it makes sense to walk through occasionally pretending to be a customer. Look at the exterior with a critical eye. Walk the aisles a customer may traverse. Try to find something specific someone may be looking for. Virtual stores are exactly the same. 

Whenever you do e-commerce website maintenance, walk through the site as a customer would. Browse and click around to find confusing messaging or unexpected dead ends. See how long it would take you to find a very specific product. 

Perhaps most importantly, test the payment process. With tools like WooCommerce, this is a very approachable process. 

You can test your store by following these simple steps:

1. Put your site in test mode if possible 
2. Log out of the site
3. Add a few different types of products to your cart
4. Select checkout
5. Fill out any checkout forms 
6. Add your payment information 
7. Complete the transaction 

Keep an eye out for any errors or confusing instructions. Make sure the payment went through as expected. Make sure that you received the right notifications and emails – both as the site admin and as the customer. Due to changes with website software and payment portals, it’s possible that a shop that worked last month has issues this month. So make sure to test frequently! 

Update and Refine Shop Content

If you’ve launched an ecommerce store and just walked away, you’re wasting the time and effort you took to launch the store in the first place. Imagine if every single time you walked into your favorite clothing store, there was no new inventory available and there were no sales or promotions. 

On a regular basis, update product listings. Refresh images and add new products. Take advantage of seasonal promotions and holidays to provide discounts or special offers. Take care to manage your inventory. The numbers should match what you have available. If something is sold out, the website needs to reflect that. Conversely, if a product is marked as sold out but you’ve replenished stock, update the inventory numbers to match. 

It’s a good idea to have a monthly flow of new stock, inventory, discounts, and promotions. Keeping your products fresh and exciting means that repeat visitors will always have something new to find. 

Additionally, updating the store with new content frequently is good for SEO. Google likes to see that your site is consistently being managed and updated with new engaging content. It doesn’t want to send someone to a store with bare dusty shelves.  

Manage Users and User Data

Many online stores require people to log in or create a user account in order to make a purchase. If you do, you may end up with tons of spam or bot users. On a regular basis, clean up and remove these old accounts. They’re taking up space on your site but most important offering points for potential site breaches. 

Now you’re left with just your real users. It’s important to make sure their data and information is kept safe. If you use a payment gateway like Stripe or PayPal, you don’t need to worry about keeping credit card information on your site. But you’re still storing private information; full names, email addresses, mailing and billing information, etc. 

Create a data management strategy in order to govern how private data is managed on your site. 

Make sure customers can easily get in touch with you if they want you to delete their records. Make sure you understand key aspects of GDPR and other data protection and regulation rules. You owe it to your customers to protect their privacy and you owe it to yourself to avoid lawsuits and breaches. 

Review User Feedback

Remember that your customers are the lifeblood of your business. They are who it’s all for. When folks leave reviews – either on your website, your social media, or third party websites – you should be taking those statements to heart. 

As a part of your e-commerce website maintenance plan, check all the places in which your customers could be providing feedback. Find trends or patterns in things people complain about. Take this a step further by examining website traffic analytics and bounce rates to see exactly where people abandon your site. This indirect feedback can help you find ways to optimize your e-commerce site for the user experience. 

Work With an E-Commerce Website Maintenance Pro

When it comes to e-commerce website maintenance it pays to work with professionals. We aren’t just saying that because we have some fantastic WordPress maintenance services, but because working with any professional agency or company can benefit you enormously. 

You don’t know what you don’t know. As a business owner in your field you may not have the time or inclination to be a website/security/UX/data specialist. You don’t need to be in order to run an e-commerce site smoothly. 

Working with a pro – like Web Pro Geeks – means you get the following:

• Peace of mind knowing that things are being handled in the background
• Access to experience and knowledge like best practices and what tools to use
• Dedicated and scheduled tasks that are performed like clockwork
• Someone on hand at all times to address downtime or security breaches
• A team nearby to answer questions when you have them
• Way more time on your hands! 

Maintaining your e-commerce WordPress website can be time consuming. But it’s well within your ability to keep your site running smoothly. WordPress as a CMS makes it easier than ever for someone without a computer science degree to run a successful e-commerce website. And, if you ever need a hand, our ecommerce website maintenance package might be perfect for you.