Hooray, your website is all set and running! Time to kick back and relax and watch as the sales pour in. You deserve it!
But always bear in mind that running a website is not a one-time thing. It is very important to maintain and monitor your site for possible issues that might adversely affect its usability and revenue.
For online merchants who run an e-commerce business, their whole business market depends on the website heavily.
To help prevent issues and improve your site’s profit and performance, chew over these five technical pieces of advice that you can implement to keep your business in good health.
1. Do A/B Testing
This is also referred to as split testing. This is when you compare two versions of a page and see which one performs the best according to the page’s purpose. This can be done by creating 2 versions of the page and have a group test them out in different situations. Play around with the layout and elements of the page and determine the factors that increase or decrease the return rate.
These tests are very useful for your marketing strategy as it will help you discover and understand what works and what updates you can make in the future to maintain your site’s overall profitability.
2. Conduct NPS Surveys
NPS or Net Promoter Score is a management tool that can be used to determine the relationship the customer has with your site or business. It basically works like a Survey that is sent through email to the customer. The customer then has to rate your business according to their experience and overall satisfaction.
If there are things that set the NPS management tool apart from the traditional customer satisfaction research is that it’s easy to implement for you as a business owner. And if you have a team that helps you maintain your site, NPS is also a versatile tool that they can augment to tailor-fit to your business.
Based on the rating your customers give you, you can now easily see your strong points and maintain or enhance them better and at the same time, work on the sides that need more attention and improvement.
3. Use Google Search Console to Monitor 404 Pages
Basically, Google Search Console lets you see how the biggest search engine (Google) sees your website. It can give you various details of your site such as your search engine placement, who has linked to your site, what pages Google has indexed, and more. The Crawl Errors section is literally one of the most useful things in Google Search Console. It lets you identify all the links that route to non-existent, 404 pages on your site. This can affect your site’s SEO and also not a good point for your users.
With this information, you have the option to permanently remove the link create landing pages or set up 301 redirects.
4. Use Google Tag Manager to Move Third-Party Codes
Google Analytics and Adwords probably is involved on your site already and so are other code snippets. These are essential to your site for analytics purposes, conversion tracking, advertising, and SEO. But, dealing with these codes can be very complex and takes a whole lot of your time. Google Tag Manager makes those things easier by centralizing everything and letting you manage all those dizzying codes from one place.
Start by creating an account for your business or website. Take the code snippet from Google Tags Manager and paste it right below the <body> tag. Once the code snippet has been added to all the pages that you want, you can now add any advertising, marketing or analytics tags you want through Google Tag Manager. Saves you the time of doing the hard coding yourself.
5. Study How Real Customer Use Your Site
Having a website is exciting. Especially if it’s the first time that you get yourself one. That’s why oftentimes, we tend to finish it quickly and watch it do the wonders. This often leads to some areas not getting much attention and also, one of the most frustrating things about having a website - bugs.
Bugs are sometimes really hard to notice, especially when you are not using your site as a customer. We often think that the glitch and the minor abnormalities are non-critical. This is not the same case if you are using the site as a customer. Every tiny issue can dramatically affect your site’s whole existence.
The best way to address this issue is to study how real customers use your site. You can do this by letting your customers submit video sessions of them using your site. Or have some testers and QAs do the job for you. It is best that you let people that don’t know about web designing or codes and stuff do these tests.
Also, as a business owner, try to use your competitors’ sites and once you find “bugs”, of course, you’ll feel a little happy that even their sites are not perfect. The opposite would be how your real customers feel.
Takeaway
Website Maintenance is almost an infinite process. Making a website is not easy. But maintaining one takes as much effort and a whole lot more of your time. While design and maintenance might be related in terms of work, you have to understand that they are also very different from each other.
As a business owner, your time for your business is very important. Maintaining your website by yourself can be very draining and you might not even have the time to shave. And sometimes, there might be things about your site that you can’t figure out on your own. And every time that happens you slowly lose your drive.
A Website Maintenance team can be very helpful to you and your business. At the very least, you won’t have to maintain your site by yourself and since this is how they earn for a living, they definitely know their stuff. You can trust that they will take care of your site while you shave or get your nails done. A healthy e-commerce site means a healthy business.
Next Wave is a Charlotte website design company. We have been doing websites since 1998. Our teams combined experience with websites touches all areas, SEO, Social Media, Graphics, Layouts, Mobile, and much more.
We are the website design experts.