Magento Maintenance Checklist – Keep Your Website at the Cutting Edge

A well-maintained Magento site provides an optimal experience for your customers. This, in turn, facilitates lead generation and sales. The best way of achieving the best results is to hire Magento developers. However, there are also measures you can take to effectively maintain peak performance internally. We explain everything you need to know below.

1) Evaluate Your Current Website Performance

As with any maintenance project, your first step needs to be identifying existing and potential faults with your Magento website. There are a number of diagnostic tools that you can use to do this, such as Google Analytics. Assess metrics such as bounce rates, traffic levels, and traffic sources to identify potential trouble spots.

2) Analyse & Address Site Speed

Site speed is vitally important to any website. The faster the website, the better the user experience. The better the user experience, the greater the chances of conversions, which translates to more revenue. As such, it’s crucial to undertake frequent speed tests on your site. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate website speed and receive practical guidance on improving it.

3) Assess & Optimise Security Measures

Having sub-par security not only puts your company and user data at risk, it also negatively impacts your SEO ranking. As a result, maintaining robust security measures should be a high priority when it comes to Magento website maintenance. Central to achieving this is updating your software with any security patches as soon as they’re released. This applies both to patches for Magento and for any plug-in you use on your website.

4) Ensure the Integrity of Your Site’s Code

Ensuring that your site and its extensions are built on quality code is another important step in Magento website development. This relates both to the site’s security and its ability to deliver an optimal user experience. Given the high level of technical proficiency required for this task, it’s advisable to hire Magento developers like Vsourz, if you’re not an expert.

5) Evaluate Code Validation

Further to code integrity, you should also evaluate your code’s validation as part of the Magento maintenance services. This means checking that your site meets Magento’s coding standards. Reviewing code validation is another area where it is safest to hire Magento developers. Only the experts can ensure your site’s coding, including any third-party plug-ins is clean.

6) Identify JavaScript Errors

Identifying JavaScript console errors is critical to ensuring that all of your site’s web elements are performing as required. It’s important to leave no stone unturned, by undertaking a comprehensive check on every page as part of your Magento maintenance checklist.

7) Fix Any Broken Links & Images

Broken links are a key element that expert Magento ecommerce developers advise you to look out for. They take away from the user experience, making it more likely for customers to leave your website than convert. Too many broken links will start to negatively impact SEO rankings too, leading to lower traffic.

There are tools available such as Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster that identify all broken links on your site so you can address them.

Similarly, broken images also negatively affect your store by affecting the user experience. The cause is normally an incorrect file path in the code. Check your website for broken images regularly, and resolve them as soon as you spot them.

8) Check All Website Forms

Many companies now use forms on their websites to support marketing and sales activities. The data that is harvested through forms is invaluable. As a result, it is important to keep your forms fully functional or run the risk of leaking leads.

To avoid this, make sure you undertake regular checks on all forms to ensure that they are accurately capturing data. Additionally, test any backend processes that you have put in place for responding to customers that fill in these forms.

9) Backup Your Website Data

Losing the data stored on your website can be catastrophic to a business. The most effective way of guarding against this is to implement frequent site backups. This enables you to quickly recover if your Magento website were to crash for any reason. You can work with a Magento web development company to ensure that your store backup is set up correctly and you can retrieve all your information in the case of a breach or other event.

10) Update Website Content Regularly

Another way to keep your Magento website at the cutting edge is to regularly update your website content. Search engines love fresh, relevant content, so this is a great way to welcome more traffic to your online store. Just ensure that you’re following SEO best practice guidelines to help boost your organic search rankings and maximise visibility for your business.

Achieving success online goes way beyond a quality Magento website build at the beginning. It’s also important to take appropriate steps to maintain your store and ensure that everything is running smoothly. While most of these measures can be handled internally, you can also hire Magento developers for extra peace of mind.

Specialists like Vsourz have a proven track record of Magento support and maintenance services that help you realise your full potential online.