4 ways to stabilise and future proof your eCommerce platform
2020 has shifted and accelerated eCommerce growth like never before, while traditional retail sales have declined, eCommerce has seen a 129% year-over-year growth (Forbes). COVID has accelerated the eCommerce industry’s growth and more businesses are joining the eCommerce business revolution than ever before.
But with the fast rate of change in technology, it is easy to get left behind with unresponsive, outdated, and ill-performing websites. What was industry-leading three years ago is no longer fit for use today. Many businesses have realised that their eCommerce sites are ill-equipped to work on mobile, and experience an abundance of bugs due to outdated coding practices.
The changing economy increases the need to keep up with emerging eCommerce trends
Here at Monsoon Consulting, we have helped many of our clients to upgrade their existing eCommerce platforms, ensuring that they are scalable, secure, and that the user experience is fully optimised. If you want to learn more about these, you can read our posts about our work with Kilkenny Group, Bellababy, and Vobe Interiors. Through our work on these sites, as well as many others, we have noticed some common issues that we consistently need to update and resolve.
When we first onboard any new client we perform a website audit that assesses the current state of the site’s performance and code quality, as well as the state of the current user experience (UX). From this audit, we collate any issues found to produce a report with our recommendations of what needs immediate attention and a timeline for future improvements. So after analysing the many reports that we have created, the following are some of the common tasks we have completed to get an eCommerce site stabilised and secure for future improvements.
Platform Upgrades
It can be easy to forgo or put off-platform upgrades when in the middle of running an eCommerce business, especially if there is no dedicated support service or team to aid in this task. Websites can be left running on outdated platforms which can lead to performance and security issues. As a result, we always recommend that eCommerce stores are on the most up to date platform before continuing with other enhancements.
Security Patches
Similar to the last point, Magento security patches can sometimes be forgotten about but are crucial to ensure the security of a platform and the user’s experience, data and information. We make it a priority to apply any missing security patches.
Magento Code Upgrades
Based on the audit we complete on the eCommerce site, a program of Magento Code upgrades is assembled. While this is tailored and unique to each eCommerce business and platform needs, it is a common improvement we undergo when onboarding new clients.
Hosting Re-Architecture
Often there is a need to set up a new hosting service for many different reasons, which has a knock on effect on the infrastructure setup. So in many cases, there is work needed on the re-architecture of the hosting for the eCommerce site. Through this, we are able to ensure that the site will be able to support traffic from any future plans you may have for new marketing and sales campaigns.
If your eCommerce platform’s performance is not meeting expectations, or able to keep up with footfall, and business growth plans then consider looking into addressing these 4 areas. But if you don’t have the technical know-how or the support team to help you, then consider getting in touch with our team of experts, who will happily guide you through the process.
If you need help stabilising your eCommerce platform then get in touch with our team at [email protected] or call us on +353 (0)1 4750066
