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Magento 2 Website Maintenance – Top 10 Tips
Suppose you run a brick-and-mortar store. After closing hours, you perform several tasks such as placing items in their original location, checking the inventory, and reconciling the payments. It ensures that the store is ready for customers the next day. If you are running a Magento 2 store, you don’t have to perform these tasks. After all, most aspects of store management are either automated or digitalised.
Nevertheless, there are other things which require your attention every now and then. We can sum them up as website maintenance. Without regular maintenance, running an online store can become a nightmare. Certain functionality may not be working correctly, or the product information may be outdated. This can lead to loss of customer trust, forcing them towards your competitors.
To avoid this situation, follow our top 10 Magento 2 website maintenance tips.
Maintaining a Magento 2 Store
1. Perform a Security Check
The one of the first things you need to do is perform a security check, ensuring your store is protected against cyber threats (internal and external). Invest in a secure server and try to keep your database server different. Apart from it, consider setting up two factor authentication in Magento 2 and using strong passwords. Lastly, you need to update your Magento 2 to the latest version. Each new version introduces new security features, while offering patches for known vulnerabilities.
2. Optimise the Code
In addition to the security, optimising the code is an important aspect of Magento 2 store maintenance. We do acknowledge that optimising the code requires technical knowledge for which you will need to hire a Magento 2 developer. The purpose of optimising the code is to improve the store’s performance. It will lead to faster loading times and reduced load on the server.
To optimise the code, you need to remove redundant or unnecessary code. Additionally, enable the cache in Magento 2. You can do so by going to Magento 2 Admin Panel > System > Cache Management.
Tick the checkbox for the cache type, click ‘Enable’ from the dropdown menu, and then ‘Submit’.
3. Test Website Functionality
Don’t worry as this does not require any technical knowledge. All you need to do is browse your store from a customer perspective. Check if all the forms are working and there are no broken links which can undermine the user experience. Ensure that the images are loading correctly, and every product has a relevant description.
4. Optimise the Images
This is one of the most overlooked parts of store management. What merchants fail to realise is that an eCommerce website is loaded with images. If the images are not optimised, it will impact the website’s loading speed. Furthermore, it will consume large amounts of data, which can be a major letdown for users on limited data plans. Therefore, you need to convert your images to the WebP format.
For those of you who don’t know, WebP images are 26% smaller than PNGs and 25-34% smaller than JPEG. FME has a Magento 2 WebP Images Extension which you can use to convert all existing images into the WebP format. This will speed up loading times and improve overall user experience. You can even request further customisations in this extension to suit your unique requirements.
5. Review Third-party Extensions
There’s no doubt that Magento’s popularity is partly due to its customisability. Third-party extensions help add new features, streamline store operations, and much more. However, you need to review your extensions every month. Update them to the latest version for optimal performance and remove the redundant ones.
6. Backup Your Magento 2 Store
A backup acts as an insurance plan against untoward instances such as cyberattacks, internal threats, or the store crashing due to a technical error. We recommend you schedule an automatic backup in Magento 2. A full backup is recommended at least once every 2 weeks.
7. Update the Content
Will you prefer to buy from a store with outdated content? Suppose the store last added a blog in 2023 or updated the product description in 2023, whereas the product has undergone significant changes since then. 10 times out of 10, the answer is no. Therefore, you need to update the content regularly. This will improve customer trust and can help increase your ranking in the search engine results page.
8. Fix Broken Links
Suppose that a visitor reaches your website via a blog link. The blog describes a new product. Upon realising that the product is exactly what they require, they proceed to click on the product link. Unfortunately, the link is dead, meaning a 404 error appears on the screen. Do you think the visitor will bother themselves with searching the product on their own?
7 times out of 10, the answer is a big no because customers demand convenience. There are several tools which you can use to find broken links, including Google Search Console. Remember, too many broken links are also an issue from the search engine optimisation (SEO) perspective. Therefore, redirect the broken link to the updated or relevant page right away.
9. Add Canonical Tags
In an eCommerce store, it is quite normal to have duplicate content. For instance, multiple webpages will be pointing to the same product page as shown below:
www.example/product1.com
As you can see for yourself, the URLs are different, but they point to the same product. Similarly, different filters can lead to the same product. The issue is that having multiple URLs for the same product can dilute link equity. Additionally, search engines like Google may mark the website as spammy, leading to lower search engine rankings. In certain cases, your website may be deindexed altogether.
10. Monitor Website Performance
Lastly, you need to monitor the website performance. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights or any other tool for this purpose. Certain metrics to keep an eye on include loading times, bounce rate, and average session duration. This will ensure that the users have an enjoyable experience.
Final Thoughts on Magento 2 Website Maintenance
This concludes our views on top 10 Magento website maintenance tips. If you have any questions or are facing issues in your Magento 2 store, reach out to our support centre.
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