For every WooCommerce website, its maintenance is crucial. But the question is, “What are the vital tasks that need to be done to maintain a WooCommerce store?“.
In this post, we have shared 8 essential activities that must be included in every WooCommerce maintenance program.
#1 Core WordPress Updates
One of the most important checkpoints for every WordPress site or a WooCommerce store is to check and ensure that its WordPress Core version is always up to date. The WordPress core is responsible for the overall performance of a WooCommerce store. Therefore, it’s crucial to ensure that your WooCommerce is performing correctly (loading speed, updated features, etc.).
#2 SSL Certificate Check
An SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate ensures that all the data processing and transactions on an e-commerce website are done with encryption.
A website (whether an e-commerce store or a normal site) that has outdated or missing SSL certificates will show security errors & warnings to the users. This can significantly affect your e-commerce sales. It is therefore an essential task for every web developer, under their maintenance contract, to check and ensure that the SSL certificate is always active and up to date.
#3 WooCommerce Plugin/theme Updates
Outdated WooCommerce-related plugins can really be a trouble for webmasters because they can show errors & warnings to the potential buyers who are browsing the website. To run your WooCommerce store seamlessly, its plugins & themes must be updated regularly.
Outdated plugins or themes can cause compatibility issues, affect the loading speed of your site, or even create security vulnerabilities. Periodically updating the theme & plugins not only ensures optimal performance but also gives you access to the latest features and improvements to ensure that your website is safe & fast. It is therefore crucial to include theme & plugin updates under any WooCommerce maintenance quotation.
Outdated plugins may:
- Affect some of the crucial features of your WooCommerce store.
- Show warning messages to your customers.
#4 Payment Gateway Testing
A payment gateway is the backbone of any e-commerce business. Without a functional payment gateway, you may not be able to sell online. Therefore, testing the payment gateway integration and ensuring that all payments can go through smoothly is another essential task that must be included in a WooCommerce maintenance plan.
#5 Testing Checkout Flow
Having a seamless checkout flow is vital for the success of any e-commerce business. Therefore, every WooCommerce website must be tested regularly to ensure that the checkout process is smooth and hassle-free. If you notice all of a sudden a sharp decline in your online sales, the two critical areas to check first should be the checkout flow and the payment gateway integration.
#6 Email Notifications Review
Sometimes, due to any unforeseen reason, such as the outdated email plugin or SMTP issues on the server, your customers may not receive email notifications about important events, such as order confirmation, order status change, etc.
If you have been running a WooCommerce or an e-commerce store for quite some time, you may find this scenario familiar. Therefore, it would be a great idea to test and ensure that all emails are being sent to customers as they should be. A professional WooCommerce developer will always include this activity under their maintenance plan.
#7 Regular Backups
Backing up your WooCommerce website regularly is a vital task that should be included in website maintenance. Regular backups protect your store and let you restore it easily if issues like server crashes or data loss occur. When you hire a web developer or an agency for your WooCommerce site maintenance, make sure that their proposal has backup as an integral activity.
#8 Loading Speed Optimization
A slow-loading WooCommerce website can affect the overall sales. Various online studies have shown that if your e-commerce store takes more than 5-6 seconds to load, your sales can drop by more than 30%. Therefore, as a webmaster, you must regularly monitor the loading speed of your WooCommerce site and fix it if needed. There are several free online tools, such as https://tools.pingdom.com, that can scan your website and reveal its loading speed along with other crucial metrics.