But, well, at least you don’t need to worry about regular cleaning or fixing faulty appliances, right?

Well, not exactly. While you won’t have problems with malfunctioning automatic doors or flickering light bulbs like in a regular store, there are plenty of things inside your online store that require regular cleaning and fixing as well. Otherwise, those initially small issues might grow big enough to negatively impact your store’s performance and your clients’ mood.

What exactly is Shopify maintenance though and why is it even that important? We’ll answer all your questions in this article – including whether should you work on store maintenance yourself or maybe it would be better to hire a Shopify support services company to take care of optimizing your store for you.  

What is Shopify website maintenance?

To ensure the success of your Shopify store, it’s crucial to maintain its performance and overall health. This involves monitoring the website, updating information, and resolving any issues that arise. By staying vigilant, you can identify and address small problems before they escalate and negatively impact your online business. For instance, if your online signup form freezes users’ browsers when they attempt to create an account, it’s likely that these potential customers won’t try again, resulting in lost clients.

If you want to encourage customers to return to your e-commerce store and make regular purchases, having a clean, fast, and secure website is just as important as having well-organized retail shelves and a functional credit card terminal. Therefore, regularly monitoring your website’s behavior and creating a maintenance plan are essential aspects of running your business.

The Shopify maintenance plan should especially include those tasks:

• Gathering and comparing data from the analytics tools (traffic analytics, heatmaps, Shopify in-built tools, etc.)
• Doing regular data backup
• Adding regular updates to any software and website plugins you use for the store (or remove them if they are no longer needed)
• Searching for and fixing any broken links inside your store.
• Checking how the store looks and works on different devices (desktop and mobile ones)
• Scanning and fixing technical issues
• Updating your content and store template
• Testing all pages for speed and performance
• Doing a routine security scan for any code vulnerabilities, malicious code, potential security breaches, etc.

If you are unsure where to start with drafting such a plan, it might be worth it to contact companies working as the Shopify support team, who can help you create such a plan for your brand and give you tips on how to stick to it.

💡 See also: our maintenance services for Reckitt – case study.

What might be the consequences of not doing website maintenance?

Many businesses tend to put off website maintenance for later or do just the bare minimum because of how much time and effort it might take them to research and update their stores. And unfortunately, they only realize once they have to deal with a sudden website downtime or a database attack that they could have avoided all those problems if they just spent time on proper maintenance. Just because of slow-loading websites, businesses lose  $2.6 billion a year!

But there are far more problems that might come together with neglecting the maintenance:

• Falling website traffic (and conversion rates)
• Low SEO rankings
• Frequent cyberattacks and infections (Google takes down several websites daily because of malware infections, and you surely do not want yours to be one of them!)
• Poor customer satisfaction and, as a result, low perception of your brand

Fixing a website downtime caused by a hacker attack or trying to get your website back to page 1 of Google search results would take you both far more time and budget than doing regular website maintenance would take. And what about restoring your damaged reputation and trust in your services? It could take several months – if not longer. And with so much competition in the e-commerce market, losing customers to slow mobile website or database leaks might mean the end of your business.

What if you need a bit more with Shopify site maintenance though, because you don’t have the time or skills needed? Then you should turn to Shopify maintenance and support services for help in keeping your website fresh.

Check our Shopify Maintenance and Support services

Shopify is known for how easy it is to customize its store even if you don’t have any coding skills. Still, though, the number of things you can do yourself is pretty limited. You can add new features via Shopify apps or add simple design changes, but if you want to fix the slow loading speed of your website, remake the shop template or find out why the number of conversions has dropped, you should reach out to Shopify experts. Many development companies now offer Shopify support and maintenance plans (with a scheduled number of hours) that includes guaranteed monthly support for their customers.

At WeCanFly, we can offer Shopify support services and ongoing maintenance as well.

Whether you need a quick fix for your website design, help with clearing bugs, or are looking for someone to keep your website working smoothly, WeCanFly is here to help. As a Shopify partner, we worked with multiple brands using both Shopify and Shopify Plus (like 303 Avenue or L’occitane) to help them manage and update their stores – or to offer ongoing Shopify support services.

Most importantly, our maintenance plan guarantees that there will always be someone to help you with an issue in your store and for as long as our help will be needed. So in case of any sudden issues, you can count on a quick response from us.

While our maintenance and support plans have a set number of hours each month (minimum 4), there’s no problem with extending the support time if the issue requires it. We’ll schedule extra time for you (depending on our workload) and agree on an hourly rate for our service. Time spent on the issue will be tracked in Toggl’s time tracking app, plus you’ll get a report at the end of our work, so you will know exactly what you are paying.

In the beginning, it is recommended that you sign up for a 3-month pilot program, then upgrade to a 6- or 12-month contract.

Let’s create the best solution tailored for your store with WeCanFly

If you want your Shopify store to bring as many customers to your store as possible, then scheduling time for regular website maintenance is absolutely essential. Spending a bit of time on spotting and patching security issues, speeding your store, and refreshing your content can save you time, money, and unnecessary trouble in the long run. And most importantly, it will make your shoppers much more likely to stop by your store and buy something from you.

So put those website maintenance steps on your calendar and stick to them – or ask WeCanFly to do it for you if you’d rather leave the maintenance to Shopify experts 🙂