10 Helpful Tips for Effective Magento Website Maintenance

Are you struggling to maintain your Magento 2 store? Here are some Magento website maintenance tips for you!

Just like brick-and-mortar stores, online shopping shops require regular maintenance as well.

Magento 2 empowers thousands of businesses to sell online through powerful and feature-rich eCommerce store creation. Yet, setting up an online store and adding products to it is not enough for a successful online business. It is essential for the store owners to maintain their Magento 2 website regularly to ensure a smooth customer experience and backend eCommerce operations.

There are plenty of things to be considered while maintaining a Magento 2 store. If you are a Magento 2 store owner struggling to effectively maintain your store, then this blog post is for you. Our Magento experts have prepared a Magento website maintenance checklist that you can use for effective maintenance.

Table of Contents

• Why Do You Need a Plan for Magento Website Maintenance?
• 10 Magento Website Maintenance Tips
  • 1. Check PageSpeed Insights
  • 2. Perform Security Check
  • 3. Fix Broken Links & Images
  • 4. Update Website Content
  • 5. Ensure Code Integrity
  • 6. Perform Website Usability Test
  • 7. Optimize Images
  • 8. Review Third-Party Extensions
  • 9. Back Up Magento 2 Store
  • 10. Test Website Forms
• Conclusion

Why Do You Need a Plan for Magento Website Maintenance?

Running an online store isn’t an easy task for businesses.

The store owners need to constantly maintain their store to ensure optimum performance in terms of every aspect. It is equally important for the Magento 2 store owners to ensure that the storefront delivers a smooth and seamless experience to the customers on the front end not to miss any of the orders. At the same time, the security of the store plays a vital role, making it necessary for the store owners to regularly check for any security loopholes in the system. Furthermore, it is essential for the store owners to keep their stores optimized for the search engines such as Google for a better organic reach.

In the same way, there are plenty of things to be taken care of while running your eCommerce store on Magento 2, making it essential for the store owners to perform regular maintenance activities.

Therefore, the Magento 2 store owners should have a solid Magento website maintenance plan ready for execution for flawless business operations.

Following the Magento website maintenance tips will help you optimize your store for better performance, user experience, security, and more.

10 Magento Website Maintenance Tips

Let’s go through some helpful Magento maintenance tips:

1. Check PageSpeed Insights

In the past few years, the website loading speed and other performance metrics have become important from the user experience perspective. Google, the leading search engine, considers website loading speed and performance one of the most important ranking factors. The core web vitals by Google measures all the important metrics related to loading speed and performance that affects the user experience. According to Google, “longer page load times have a severe effect on bounce rates”.  The probability of the users bouncing back from the website significantly increase with an increase in the page loading time.

You can easily measure the performance of your Magento 2 store using the official PageSpeed Insights tool. The tool will display the performance report of the webpage based on the past data. Optimize the speed of your Magento 2 store to meet the minimum requirements and pass the test.

2. Perform Security Check

Security is one of the important aspects of your Magento 2 store that needs regular attention. Poor site security and negligence can risk your customer’s data, including sensitive payment information. A single security loophole in your Magento store can cause great chaos, and you may need to suffer legal challenges as well.

Adobe releases regular security patches and updates for the Magento 2 store to shield against the known security flaws in the system. Therefore, it is essential to make sure that the system is updated to the latest security patch. If you are feeling short of technical know-how, you can take help from the experts for Magento security patches installation.

Some of the important points to consider for your Magento 2 store to ensure optimum security are:

• Enable 2 Factor Authentication
• Choose Custom Admin Path
• Use SSL Certificate
• Set Maximum Login Attempts Allowed
• Use HTTPS
• Prefer Reliable Hosting Provider
• Review Admin Action Log for Malicious Actions
• Configure Password Expiration

3. Fix Broken Links & Images

The Magento 2 maintenance activities include fixing the broken links and images on the website. It may happen that the links that you have mentioned in the content may no longer be accessible, resulting in a broken link. In the same way, your store may have broken images with an incorrect file path that can further deteriorate the user experience.

Furthermore, broken links on the website provide negative signals to the crawlers and can negatively affect the search engine rankings of the Magento store. Therefore, it is essential for the Magento 2 store owners to find and fix broken links and images on the website for better customer experience and SEO performance. There are different ways to do that. You can take help from tools such as Google Search Console and Ahrefs to find the broken links and images on your store.

4. Update Website Content

Content fuels the internet. It forms the backbone of the websites and plays an important role in user engagement and SEO. In this information-driven world where things are constantly changing, it is important for websites to keep their content afresh. This is one of the most important things not to avoid during the Magento website maintenance.

Change is inevitable for survival, and this applies to your Magento 2 store as well. You may notice that the content of your website becomes outdated with time and needs to be updated. The facts and figures mentioned in the content or the trends may have changed over time and seek your attention.

Keeping your website content afresh improves the user experience of the store. Moreover, it is also essential from the SEO perspective. Search engines such as Google prioritizes fresh content that is updated with time. Frequently updating the content on your Magento 2 store will re-index the web pages on Google with fresh content and give a little boost to your overall rankings.

Some of the useful tips to update your Magento 2 website content are:

• Avoid Keyword Cannibalization: Ensure that you are not targeting the same keyword for multiple pages.
• Update Information: Re-check the facts and figures mentioned in the content that may have changed over time.
• Find New Keywords: Perform the keyword research again to find trending keywords and optimize content accordingly.
• New Content & Design: Refresh your Magento 2 store with fresh content and design that follows the trend.

5. Ensure Code Integrity

Magento 2 is an open-source eCommerce platform that allows tweaking the source code for customizations. Benefits apart, the open-source nature of the system makes it prone to coding-related issues. A poorly written source code can directly affect the performance of the Magento store and can hit hard on the overall profits. Therefore, it is highly important for the store owners to ensure the code integrity of the Magento 2 system during maintenance activities.

It is highly essential to check for the coding standards of your store after any customizations, extension installation, migration, or upgrade. Ensure that the Magento 2 extensions installed on your store follows the coding standards prescribed by Magento. Perform a white box testing of your Magento 2 website to ensure that there are critical bugs in the source code. If you are not too tech-savvy person to do that, you can hire Magento developers from Meetanshi to perform 360-degree testing of your website.

Adobe releases regular core updates for Magento 2, and it is advisable to upgrade your Magento 2 store to latest version to the Magento 2.4.5 for better performance and enhancements.

6. Perform Website Usability Test

As mentioned earlier in this post, user experience (UX) plays a vital role in eCommerce businesses. Checking the usability of your Magento 2 store will help you ensure that the storefront delivers a smooth and intuitive experience to the customers. This includes testing your website from the end user’s perspective.

Get into your customer’s shoes and test the usability of the website from various aspects. It is essential for your store to have a smooth product browsing and shopping experience.

During the Magento 2 website maintenance, check the usability using the following actions:

• Browse Products
• Add Products to Cart
• Place Orders Using Different Payment Methods
• Update Account Details
• Request Order Cancellations & Returns

7. Optimize Images

Images are an inseparable part of any eCommerce store. Sometimes, these images can occupy some extra space and can add to the page loading, leading to poor performance of your store. Therefore, it is essential to optimize the images in your store during Magento 2 maintenance. Optimizing the images in Magento 2 store can have multiple benefits including the improved performance, faster page loading speed, more space, and more SEO benefits.

Include optimizing images in your Magento website maintenance checklist. There are multiple ways for image optimization in Magento 2. Some of the steps that you can take to compress images in your Magento 2 store are compressing images, lazy loading, switch to WebP format, and multiversion images.

You can remove unused product images in Magento 2 to clean up extra space and boost the store’s performance. It is usually advisable to perform this clean-up regularly in the Magento store for better performance.

8. Review Third-Party Extensions

Extensions are important parts of the eCommerce stores built on Magento. They add custom functionalities to the store and make online selling easier. The number of third-party modules installed in your system may go up with your increasing business requirements. During the Magento 2 maintenance, it is essential to have a look at all the third-party extensions installed in your store. Generally, most extension providers release regular updates that fix performance and compatibility-related issues; make sure that you are extensions are up to date.

During the Magento website maintenance, ensure that all the extensions are working properly and not affecting the store’s functionalities. Low-quality extensions may also be one of the reasons for slow performance. Explore our range of 200+ feature-rich Magento 2 extensions

9. Back Up Magento 2 Store

Data is an important asset for online businesses. The best practices for Magento website maintenance includes backing up the important data of your store, which includes the products, customers, orders, and more.

It is important to back up your store’s data regularly to avoid complete loss in case of any unforeseen events such as a server crash. You can perform a manual backup of your store regularly or use third-party extensions to automate the process. Our Magento 2 cloud backup extension makes it possible for the store owners to take automatic backup of the data at regular intervals so that they can scale their business carefree with the assurance of data security.

10. Test Website Forms

Customer data is priceless for the store owners. It can help you better understand your customers and craft a marketing strategy accordingly. Website form is one of the known methods for the Magento 2 store owners to collect information from the website visitors and existing customers. The forms are often used by the Magento store owners for marketing and sales activities such as collecting information about the leads and more.

You can also create a custom form in Magento 2 to collect information from the website visitors as per your requirements.

The Magento website maintenance checklist includes testing the data collection forms on the website. It is important to ensure that the forms are working properly and the data is accurately captured in the Magento 2 system. Also, make sure to make it easier for the visitors to fill up the form and submit it without much effort by asking for the minimum required information.

Conclusion

Maintaining your Magento 2 store is crucial for optimum performance and consistent user experience. Maintaining a Magento website single-handedly can be a bit challenging task for non-tech people. The Magento website maintenance tips provided above highlight the most important things on your website that needs your regular attention. Also you can eliminate render blocking resources in Magento 2 as they significantly affect the loading speed of your store.

You can add these tips to your Magento website maintenance checklist; not to forget any of them during your next maintenance. In case you still have any queries or doubts, feel free to comment. I’d love to interact with you. 😊

Checkout our comprehensive Magento 2 website audit checklist.

Also, do not forget to share these Magento 2 maintenance tips with your merchant friends via social media. 😃

Thanks for reading. 🍀

Also Read, Benefits of Hiring Certified Magento Developers

Also Read:

• Magento 2 SEO Guide: Tips, Tricks, and Best Practices