Not giving a lot of importance to your eCommerce Store can directly impact your bottom-line. Here are a few signs that tell when you should get really serious about your Woocommerce Store Maintenance.

Let’s go through all of them one by one and see which sign directly signals you.

1. Your Website is Really Slow

An average website should load under four seconds. At least that is the time that it should take the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) or the biggest image on a website to load.

If your website is taking more time to load these images, then your website is slow. It will be reflected in Google Search Console (GSC) Core Web Vitals panel as well. For those of you who don’t know what this means, here is what you should know.

If your website is slow, it will lead to lower traffic volume, which in turn will lead to lower order volume on your eCommerce store. Indirectly, all these changes on your website directly hit your bottom-line. So, when this happens, you have to start WooCommerce maintenance as soon as possible.

2. Cart Abandonment Rate has Increased

If you constantly monitor your website performance and order volume, you will easily be able to check the cart abandonment rate. For those of you who are unsure about the abandoned checkout rate, here is what it does.

The cart abandonment rate shows the number of people who actually put products in their cart but didn’t shop from your website. Now there are many reasons why people won’t shop from your website and they can relate to price, user experience, product layout or design, or maybe a simple change of thinking.

In short, these people who abandoned your cart and didn’t buy from your product are leaving your store for something better. Perhaps it is time to look into this matter and revamp your website accordingly so that it directly engages the right type of buyers who not only put the products in the cart but actually buy them.

3. WordPress Site is Outdated

Another reason to focus on website maintenance is that if your WordPress site core is outdated or has themes or plugins installed that are not updated frequently, then they can directly impact the website performance.

You can check the updates of your WordPress website on the dashboard. WordPress usually shows the current version of your WordPress installation and also shows if you need to update the core installation or not.

Now if your WordPress theme is not updated, you can update it with just a single click. However, if your WordPress core version is not updated, then you will need to backup everything first before running the site backup.

If you don’t create a site backup and if the WordPress core gets corrupted, then you won’t have any way to save the data on your website. So, make sure that you properly back it up.

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4. Plugins are Outdated

Another reason to maintain your Woocommerce Store is if the installed plugins on the website have become outdated.

WordPress offers plugins from a lot of developers and not all of them offer constant support. So most of these plugins become outdated and just a burden on your WooCommerce store. If your website is acting up, runs slowly, or doesn’t offer a decent user experience, then it is high time to look for these outdated plugins on your website and fix them accordingly.

That is another reason why you should be maintaining your WordPress website and WooCommerce store on a regular basis.

5. Scripts are Not Working

It would be dangerous for your business if the scripts on the website stop working. So, we would instead recommend to you that you test all scripts available on your website on a regular basis.

You can do site audit once per month so that if the scripts available on your website are not working, or if they have stopped working in the past few weeks, you will be able to know about it immediately.

There are a plethora of WooCommerce website audit tools available in the market but I personally prefer Screaming frog for website testing and audit. It is not just fast but also simplifies the errors that are found on the site. You can then fix them accordingly if and when needed.

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6. Your Site Had Higher Downtime

One sign for WooCommerce store maintenance is when your website is experiencing a higher downtime. But before we discuss this further, you should know that downtime can also occur because of the hosting solution you use for your site business. If that is the case, then instead of WooCommerce store maintenance, you would have to switch your store hosting.

With that said, if your store is behaving unnaturally and the site stops loading mid-way, then perhaps that is a signal for site maintenance.

7. Product Pages Don’t Show Images

Sometimes when you visit a product page on a store, you will see that the images are not loading or have stopped loading mid-way. This is because the cache available on the server has not passed the complete image to the client browser.

In such a case, first, disable the cache that you are using. Now refresh your browser or use a clean browser to open your website. You may have to disable the CDN as well because it may also have an old image of your server.

Now check if the product images show. If not, then you will need to check if the images were properly stored on your website when they were loaded to the system. This is a sign of complete WooCommerce store maintenance.

Your Website Shows Too Many 404 Errors

8. Your Website Shows Too Many 404 Errors

In many cases, these URLs are indexed or linked to previous pages on the website. So, when users click on them, they show a 404 message and the user is not able to reach his desired destination. When this happens, the bounce rate of the website increases and the average time on site decreases. This hurts organic site rankings and paid page score.

So, this is another reason why WooCommerce stores should maintain their websites on a regular basis to avoid such a scenario in the long-term.

We hope we have provided a list of signals that show when a website or a WooCommerce store is in a dire need of site maintenance.

If you are unsure how to audit and do maintenance of your WooCommerce store properly, you can always get in touch with our WooCommerce experts to get your website health problems solved effectively.

The post Eight Signs You Need to Focus on Woocommerce Store Maintenance appeared first on WP Creative.