How can you maintain a Magento website effectively?

Intro

Magento is a power and widely preferred ecommerce platform due to its simplicity with which a developer can build a quick website. While building a website and making an online presence is important, maintaining the site properly plays a crucial role in increasing the value of the business.

As in any other platform, issues occur on Magento over time impacting the areas like performance, search engine ranking, user experience and more. Maintaining the website from time to time benefits your business to stay on top of the game and increase the credibility of the business.

Always remember, if you need a certified Magento developer to take care of the website promptly – Contact us.

Follow these maintenance tips for your site to run smoothly and click here to download the maintenance checklist.

Upgrade to the Latest Magento Version.

Magento developers work around the clock to make the platform reliable, robust and more importantly secure for its users. They come up with security patches and bug fixes from time to time to improve the performance of the platform. Users are expected to make these updates promptly to secure the website from threats and malwares.

Along with the timely Magento versions updates, modules installed must be updated to the latest version for the respective functionalities to work properly on the website.

Less is More – Install only required extensions.

Performance and server utilization are hurt when your website runs extensions that are not required for the business besides increases the maintenance burden. Improperly designed extensions can cause the site to become slow, inefficient, malfunction and hence it is advisable to run only the extensions which serves your requirement.

Extensions from trusted extension providers must be installed and updated as a standard practice. If you are not able to get it from the trusted provider, hiring a certified developer is recommended.

Ameex has contributed a few extensions to the community and developed several custom extensions to the clients.

Host on a stable hosting platform.

Hosting the website on a top tier hosting provider helps you avoid unnecessary turbulence and makes the maintenance easier. It is essential to choose a server configuration that fits your website the best based on the number of products listed, Magento version, size of the database and the traffic.

Besides, choose a hosting provider who can upscale the server as your website grows to avoid future server migration costs. Implementing load balancer is a best way to prevent overloading of CPUs and RAM leading to site down during heavy traffic. Avoid running other applications on the same server.

Ameex technologies has partnered with Pantheon and Acquia, leading hosting providers for hosting our client’s website apart from AWS.

Security

Version updates along will not help when it comes to security, it must be ensured that the latest TLS 1.3 version is enabled, and website is SSL certified. Ameex monitors the SSL validity and inform clients about the renewal before the validity expiration as part of 24x7 services.

Blacklist the IP to defend against the SQL injection and protect your admin panel with the 2-factor authentication. Review the all the permission to the files/code and directory in regular intervals.

Update server application

It is equally critical to update the server application such as operating system, PHP, Database version and other application as we update the website for smooth functioning. Besides makes the file transfer through only SFTP, HTTPS, we recommend restricting the access to servers only to your organization’s IP address to protect it from malicious attacks.

Please refer Magento Article for minimal configuration required for Magento 2.3 versions.

Syncing the Dev and Staging environment

Setting a Dev and Staging environment are essential for all website maintenance related activity and with GIT, any changes made can be traced. Testing the changes on Staging environment before making the changes live is the recommended practice. No changes must be taken to live from Dev environment.

Based on the changes you make on the website, you can sync the Dev and Staging either weekly, monthly. Ameex’s certified developers obtains approval from the clients for the changes implemented on the staging before taking it to live as a standard practice every time.

Check the Order Process

At the end of the day, the bread and butter of every store is its sales and revenue numbers. Ensuring that the order process is smooth and seamless can help increase in the sales. Any disruption or error during the checkout can badly impact in the reputation of the store and lead to lose of customers.

Every aspect of the checkout process such as add to cart, add to favorites, checkout and payment must be monitored every day. One step checkout process is popular amongst the users.

Promotions and Contents

It is important to bring new contents to the website often to engage the customers. It helps in increasing the traffic and the SEO ranking of the website organically. Likewise, run mail campaigns and discount campaigns seasonally to increase the revenue and sales of the store.

Search for best keywords on Google search engine and add them as meta tags to your website pages. Making the URL relevant to the page, checking for good grammar and spelling, adding the page to the local directory are mandatory.

Place CTAs and newsletter subscriptions on the top and bottom of the pages respectively to increase organic lead generation.

Database optimization

Magento is indeed a server resource heavy platform. Magento saves all the data related to visitors and customers such as product searched, payment in its database. It is absolutely mandatory to optimize the tables regularly to keep the site performance stable.

The database can be optimized through cleaning the log for database tables through manually or by PHP scripts. (Taking a backup is recommended before clearing the logs).

CDN and Performance optimization

Caching the site is one of the best ways to improve the performance of the website. Ameex technologies works with one of the pioneers in CDN, Cloudflare to secure the websites. Other way to increase the performance would be through reverse HTTP proxy where a copy of the website is stored in the computer RAM of the visitor.

For better performance, images should be optimized and rendered in the next gen formats. Compressing the CSS and JS files decreases the size of the page and makes the page load faster.

Mobile friendly

Mobile friendly website is not any more a luxury but a necessity. With more and more people accessing the website and purchasing from mobile, it is essential for any website to be mobile friendly. More than 90% of people in USA search for local stores through their phone. Making the desktop site responsive to mobile screens providers a better user experience for mobile visitors and retains them on the website for a longer period.

Conclusion

Just like your car requires regular maintenance, website must be taken a good care for it to function properly. Following these maintenance tips, you will be able to avoid complication in running a stable website. Ameex is a trusted brand providing website maintenance for more than a decade to more than 100 clients across the United states.