Maintaining your new website - Why and How?

Got your new website launched: What’s next?

To keep your website working and converting sales you would need to maintain it. A website could be compared to a living organism – that’s why you need to reorganize it according to your users needs.

You finally launched your website, but are you really done?

I know, you worked hard and made some important decisions, your website is finally live and working. Congrats on this but the work is far from being done. In fact, the work on a website never really comes to a ‘’done’’ stage.

If you are not periodically maintaining your website, this article is just for you. By maintaining your website regularly, you can profoundly get ahead of your competition and dominate the market.

Why do you need to maintain your website?

If you are expecting your website to be converting right away and it does - that’s great news! Reality after a successful launch of an eCommerce website is often a bit bitter.

You’d also have to make sure that other aspects of your business are working well. Yes, I am talking about your Marketing. You would need some decent strategy to convert those eyes looking at social media and to make them click on your ads.

Even after this is all sorted, the converting results are rarely satisfying right away. Are the people coming to your website genuinely interested in what it consists of or were they just hooked by a good ad? Are they engaged with the content or the bounce rate is going through the roof?

Frankly speaking, this lack of success from the very beginning is expected and you shouldn’t worry about it. Being on your toes and working regularly maintaining your website is the way to ensure it stays relevant for your visitors.

Track and improve regularly

Having your website always sharp and ready to make sales is a continuous process. The key is to track different indicators and to improve the things that you notice are lacking. Here are some of the metrics that would give you an overview of how your website is performing:

• Monthly sales
• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Exit rate
• CTR (click through rate)
• Bounce rate

You can select any of these metrics or others that you’d figured out would be important for your business goals. There are plenty of options to use for tracking. The most widely used ones are Google Analytics, Metrica and Facebook Pixel and each of them can help you succeed with data driven design decisions.

Now let’s share some key points that you need to keep in mind when maintaining your website:

A/B Testing

Thanks to all that data that we can collect, brings us to A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing). This is a method of comparing two or more versions of a webpage or an ad for example, against each other. The goal of this method is to come up with the best performing version by eliminating subjective thoughts. A/B testing is essentially a test where two or more variants of a web page are randomly shown to visitors. Then, one can determine by statistics which of the version performed best at a specific metric.

Testing takes the guesswork out of the optimization process and enables informed decisions that are based on data. By measuring the impact that changes have on your metrics, you can ensure that every change produces positive results.

Sometimes, it could be hard to exclude your emotions in optimizing a piece of your website that you personally like. Remember that it is more important which version performs better among your visitors in the end, their positive experiences are what leads to more sales. By implementing this method of testing and making it a habit for the future you are helping yourself by not being subjective about the design of your website.

Speed check

Improving the content on your website will always help to build on engagement. What many websites struggle with, even if they have great content, is the loading speed of the website. If the loading time is too slow, your users are not going to have a great experience.

Every once in a while, check if your website can be improved. Remove slow-performing plugins, reduce and optimize the size of your images, make sure your website is not loaded with too many videos or advertisements.

Improve user experience

This is where you should always try to maximize your periodic maintenance. Many websites have poor navigation elements. Sometimes, links don't work, the fonts are not appropriate or the visuals are distracting. By improving the user experience on your website more often, you will be able to gradually increase the conversion rate from visitors to customers. A great you will be able to gradually increase the conversion rate from visitors to customers. A great way to do that is by the A/B testing method mentioned above.

Stay trendy

Doing online business means constant adaptation to what users are used to across the web. Don't keep the same picture on your website for too long. Keep updating it. Add infographics or stock pictures. But periodically improve the look and feel of your website. This one is highly subjective but you know that feeling when you visit a website and it feels ancient, almost like it was from a different era. To avoid that, try to get familiar with the latest design branding trends and make sure you implement them on your website.

A great way to get a more engaged audience is by videos. There is a trend across all platforms in which the algorithms boost the performance of video content over still images. This could be noticed in Instagram, Facebook and it explains the rising popularity of Tiktok. If you do not have videos on your website, highly recommend using videos as a form of showing your content. Many users might prefer to watch a video rather than read. If the product you market still doesn’t have a video showcasing its usage, videos are your way to bring more value to it.

Adapt to all devices - Improve your mobile version

In 2022, it is a MUST to constantly track and improve the mobile and tablet versions of your website. People are now engaged via their phones or tablets more than ever. If you only spent time improving your website’s desktop version before you launched it, please, make yourself a favor and update it for mobile visitors as well.

Takeaway on website maintenance

The biggest takeaway from this article should be the testing part and hopefully it encourages you to try new design and developments on your future project.

A great website is perhaps the most powerful tool an online business can have. To keep it sharp and generate sales, you need to take good care of it. A website works even while you sleep and you have to put the necessary efforts upfront so it serves you as it should.