When you are operating an eCommerce business, your website is incredibly important. Even if you sell the majority of your products or services through another online marketplace, your website will still be visited by consumers. They may want to find out more about your company and reassure themselves that you are a legitimate business.

If your website doesn’t function properly, they may take their business elsewhere. Here are three crucial maintenance steps every eCommerce business should take to keep their customers coming back for more.

Maintaining Website Accessibility

Your website is one of the most important aspects of your online business. It gives your consumers their first experience of your business, like a handshake or an introduction. If your site is difficult to use, lacks functionality, or has areas that are inaccessible to users, you will lose potential sales, and online consumers will avoid your site. Maintaining your website’s accessibility is incredibly important.

There are automated online tools that can help. ADScan from AbleDocs can scan your external and internal websites and documents and ensure they are accessible to users. If you have several pdf files available on your site, this website accessibility checker will test them to make sure that any visitor or employee has access to them. This service can be automated to run periodically and produce a reliable report on the functionality and accessibility of your website and files.

Backing Up Your Site

Websites can go offline suddenly for reasons beyond your control. Your Internet Service Provider (ISP), hosting service, or the software that underpins your eCommerce site can all affect its accessibility. Completing regular backups can help protect your site and help get you back online quickly. The more recent your backup is, the fewer changes and updates you will have to make to it when you have restored functionality.

It is good eCommerce business practice to back up your website every day, often at the end of your working day. This helps you maintain up-to-date backups that can be implemented without losing your progress throughout the previous working period. If your website goes offline or becomes corrupted during your work day, you can upload the previous backup and only lose a few hours of work rather than multiple days or even weeks.

Broken Links Break Businesses

One of the most common problems when operating any kind of website is broken links. Many pages hyperlink to one another, and a single small change in a web address or coding can cause massive problems across the links on your web pages. This can affect a consumer's ability to access their account, check their purchase history, or make new purchases. Broken links cost you money.

There are many tools available, including Google-based online tools, that can help you to identify broken web links on your site, as well as links to your site and also links away from it. All of these are vital parts of your eCommerce website’s consumer experience. Maintaining functional links on your site, as well as to it on your social media pages, should be done regularly to ensure the integrity of your website.

Make sure you cover these three bases to keep your site online and looking professional. Taking these simple steps can be the difference between growing your customer base, and falling behind your competitors.