You went into business to sell products or services, not manage a website, right? However, you’re unlikely to achieve your sales goals without a well-designed website. Today’s websites aren’t just the “digital business cards” of the 1990s and early aughts. They are fully functional business outposts that need regular attention. This is where website management comes into play. In this blog, we’ll look at the benefits of good website management and provide tips for making the most of your website.
What is Website Management?
Getting your website up and running is just the beginning. Websites need to be monitored and updated regularly in order to serve their purpose. Even if you’re pretty tech-savvy, you may not have enough time to manage your website on your own – especially with the internet becoming more complex as it continues to expand. So, most ecommerce website development businesses will employ or hire a website manager or hire an outside vendor. Some of the responsibilities this individual will take on include:
- Ensuring website functionality
- Performing software updates
- Monitoring website performance
- Developing and updating content
- Making design adjustments
- Maintaining website security
- Optimizing for search
- And much more
Importance of Website Management
A website should run like a well-oiled machine. When it’s managed properly, there are many benefits to be had. Here are our top five benefits of website management.
Building Customer Interest
A well-maintained website will attract new customers and keep existing customers coming back. Design is only half the battle, however. Your website needs to be customer-centric and intuitive, and content needs to be kept fresh so that there is a reason to return to it time and time again. Inbound marketing techniques such as blogging and creating offers such as Ebooks and whitepapers can also bring potential customers to your website and can make you look like an authority on different products or topics.
Ranking in Search Engines
Website maintenance is crucial when it comes to ranking in search engines. If your website isn’t ranking highly when someone searches for the type of products or services you offer, your competition is going to wind up getting their business. So, refreshing and updating content regularly is critical as this will help you to rank higher in search engine listings. Content should also be optimized for search engines so that they are deemed worthy of crawling. Properly formatting content for the web is an art and a science, so website content management requires an understanding of both HTML and SEO.
Conveying Brand Image
Your website is a reflection of your brand. If your site was designed a decade ago (or just looks like it was), contains lots of spelling and grammatical errors or outdated content, is confusing to navigate, or has broken links and dead pages, customers will think that you simply don’t care and are likely to find another company that does. It’s important to routinely take a look at the look and feel of your website (and your competitors’ website) to ensure you’re keeping up with trends and that it’s fully functional and error-free.
10 Tips for Ecommerce Website Management
Looking for ways to improve your website performance? We’ve got 15 tips for eCommerce website management, from daily maintenance suggestions to long-term marketing ideas.
Perform Website Backups
Disaster can strike at any time, in the form of hackers, power outages, human error, or weather events. Backing up your website regularly will prevent you from losing critical information if your site becomes compromised. It’s also important to check that a website restore can easily be performed in the aftermath of an incident if your backup strategy doesn’t work.
Monitor Downtime
When a website goes down, so do sales. For small eCommerce businesses, downtime costs approximately $137 to $427 per minute. The larger the business, the more these costs rise (for example, downtime at Amazon costs are estimated to be a jaw-dropping $12 million per hour). In addition to lost sales, downtime also reflects poorly on your business, turning off customers who expect perfection. So, if you notice a lot of downtime, it’s time to think about upgrading your hosting plan or switching hosting companies.
Perform Daily Security Reports
Security threats and malware are on the rise, and customers want to feel comfortable providing you with their personal and financial information (this is why PCI compliance is so important). The vast majority of cyberattacks are automated and designed to use your website as a platform to phish for information, often resulting in credit card fraud. Website maintenance means making sure the site is secure and that the architecture on which it is built is up-to-date. It includes both passive management (e.g., setting up firewalls) and active management (e.g., conducting malware scans).
Test Across Browsers
Your website layout can change from browser to browser. For example, it may look great in Chrome, but not Safari. Testing your site across browsers to make sure the user experience works on all of them is important, as a broken or confusing layout is bound to frustrate customers. You should also check your site on major browsers on mobile devices to be sure it’s completely responsive.
Review Analytics and Metrics
Which traffic sources visitors are coming from? How long do they stay on the website? Which pages are viewed most often? Which products perform the best? Data analytics and metrics can answer these questions and help you to better market your site to customers. Of course, this data will change over time, so this should be conducted regularly so that you don’t miss out on opportunities to increase efficiency and ultimately boost revenue.
Check Loading Times
Is your website slow? Are pages “lazy loading”? Website maintenance includes testing your website’s loading times at least monthly, and especially when you add new content, which could decrease load speeds. If you fail to test and increase load times, customers may abandon the site out of frustration, resulting in lost sales.
Test Your Forms
Your contacts are your most valuable asset, so be sure your website is capturing them! Regularly go through your website and fill out and test each form to ensure no inquiry, contact, or sale gets lost due to a non-working form.
Update Regularly
You can’t build a website and let it sit idle. To maximize its potential, it must be updated regularly to keep content fresh and keep customers coming back. This will also help the site perform better in search engine algorithms, which reward newly created content. Of course, don’t forget about your product pages – keep those images and descriptions up-to-date, and don’t forget to remove old or out-of-stock products.
Create Engaging Content
Although the main purpose of your site is to sell, quality content can bring people to your site who otherwise may not have gone there (it also can make you an authority or go-to source for certain topics). Blog posts are a common form of content, but other eCommerce retailers connect with customers through videos, podcasts, downloadable offers, and even live events like webinars. Website content management is vital if you want your website to generate leads and it’s a great way to get free traffic. It can also be easily shared on social media from one person to another.
Conclusion
So, these are the 10 easy steps to manage your ecommerce website. Make sure you follow these to manage your ecommerce website with ease. If you have other options or steps for managing your ecommerce website, you should put that into implementation.
