A stylish and efficient ecommerce website is essential if you're trading online. With Magento, you have a stable and well-used open-source platform available to build a range of online retail interfaces.

With an extensive Magento ecommerce store development community, numerous experienced agencies, and many extensions available, it can provide the range of functionality needed to meet your business requirements.

But while Magento offers you an excellent platform to sell online, your responsibilities don't end with set-up. Your Magento ecommerce store requires ongoing care to maintain optimum functionality and a smooth user experience, so you'll need to ensure that it's regularly updated and tested, as well as monitored for performance and speed. Let's look more closely at what practices you should follow to get the best from your Magento store.

Check Your Order Process


Keeping your customers satisfied is your number one priority and that means making sure your order process is up-to-scratch. Broken forms or slow performance can be off-putting to customers, so check every component of your order process from the user's perspective. Also, ensure that the design and flow of your forms are usable. Overly complex and slow input processes, or unnecessary data-gathering can be frustrating, leading to cart abandonment.

 

Update Magento Regularly


As open-source software, Magento has an extensive developer base, constantly working to improve functionality and fix bugs. They also update the platform to counter security threats or weaknesses. However, to benefit, you need to stay on top of software updates – which must be installed manually. Keeping your installation updated means you always have the latest performance improvements, and your security is at its most rigorous.

 

Test And Update Overall Performance


You should spend time regularly testing your Magento store performance. Running through the site manually is useful for basic checks, but it's easy to miss problems through over-familiarity. Common faults like slow page load times, broken CTA buttons and inappropriately large images look unprofessional and can ruin the user experience. Your web stats can give you some clues here: by checking engagement and bounce rates you'll get an indication of how many visitors are giving up before purchase. You can also use MDOQ to help identify performance issues, as well as test them using a parallel set-up to avoid downtime on your live site.

 

Monitor Website Speed


Website speed is a major issue for users, who quickly tire of slow loading pages or delayed form submissions. Speed also plays a part in your online visibility, since search engines effectively penalise sites in their rankings for slow performance. Again, regular testing is vital. You can also benefit from using tools like Google Page Speed Insight, which gives metrics on latency and load times of site elements for both mobile and desktop devices.

 

Using MDOQ


Effective website maintenance can seem like a headache, but without it, you risk losing sales and damaging your brand. That's why it pays to use MDOQ. MDOQ is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) that facilitates the management, development, and testing of Magento stores. It works with all versions of Magento and can be used equally by developers, QA teams or marketers to assess and improve the service. We're happy to offer you a free 30-day trial so you can see the benefits for yourself – please get in touch to find out more.

 

Image Source: Canva