So you’ve got a new eCommerce website built with WordPress & you are going to launch soon, that’s awesome!
But before you launch your online store publicly, what are your QA(testing) plans & strategies? Have you ensured that your eCommerce website is ready to get exposure from users & search engines? Has your eCommerce developer done the required QA?
If yes, then do not read this post further & start counting the money that you will earn from your website however if you haven’t gone through the testing process yet, hold it! Do not launch your website first. After all, it’s about your reputation & investment. So do not take any risks.
You must be wondering what should be the important QA elements to be done for a WordPress-based eCommerce website.
In this blog post, we will learn about a few important QA checklists that every business must follow before they launch their WordPress eCommerce website.
#1 Security
A. Secure Admin Login
If your WordPress developer has not secured the admin login of your website yet, ask him to do now. This is the first step to protecting your website from preying eyes of hackers. How to do this? Below are a few important measures to secure admin login of any WordPress eCommerce website:
1. Never use “admin” as a username
2. Use a one-time password process for your admin login. This one-time password will be valid for one session only. You can use plugins like One Time Password which will do this job for you quickly.
3. Use plugins like Login Lockdown that will block access to the site after a given number of failed login attempts.
4. Add a secured firewall for your WordPress website through some of the great plugins like Wordfence. This plugin also helps to lock down admin login for the users who are trying to log in with several failed attempts or you may also lockdown admin for the users who are trying to log in with specific usernames.
By implementing the above measures for your eCommerce website, I am sure you will definitely take care of most of the security problems associated with WordPress websites.
B. Secure WordPress Website
Other than securing admin login for any WordPress eCommerce website, it’s also important to protect the whole website against virus threats. Being the most popular CMS in the world, WordPress has become a popular target of hackers too. With some useful plugins like AntiVirus, you can secure your WordPress eCommerce website from viruses.
You can read more about securing your WordPress eCommerce website in one of my previous blog posts.
#2 SEO
As we all know that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is one of the effective ways to get traffic to a website. If you want to attract a well-targeted audience to your eCommerce website, then you must make sure that your website has all the basics yet important On-page SEO elements in place. Let’s discover them one by one.
A. 404 Pages
The non-existent web pages of a website show “Page Not Found” aka 404 (header status). These pages are bad not only for the users’ experience but also affect the SEO score of a website.
Therefore, in the very first place, every webmaster should make sure that there are no such pages and even if there are no such pages found on a website, a script must be added in the .htaccess file which should redirect all 404 pages to 301 (moved permanently).
Luckily, there are several helpful plugins like 404 to 301 that are available for WordPress eCommerce websites (free to use) which make this process as quickly as 5 minutes.
B. Broken Links
The links that show “page not found” are known as broken links. There could be several reasons for a broken link for eg. spelling mistakes of the URL on a link, linking to non-existent pages, etc. Again, broken links affect badly both the user experience as well as SEO score of a website. Therefore it must be fixed on the top priority, especially when you have an eCommerce website.
There are some useful plugins like Broken Link Checker that help webmasters to identify and fix broken links on their eCommerce websites.
D. Loading Speed
Using high-resolution product images on an eCommerce website is quite normal because every website owner wants their users to view and feel the products in a better way. But do you know, by using high-resolution images, we compromise on the loading speed of our website?
Slow loading speed is really frustrating for the users and at the same time, it affects SEO too. Search engines like Google consider the loading speed of a website as one of the most important criteria to rank a website in the top positions of search results.
There are some online tools like Page Speed Insights that are available free of cost to check the loading speed of a website. Also, these tools help to identify the possible causes of slow loading speed.
E. Meta Tags
For those who don’t know about meta tags – A meta tag is a summary of any webpage that we can use to help search engines to understand that page and show them on the search results too. Having targeted keywords in meta tags can increase the chances of better positioning on search engine listings.
Have you properly utilized meta tags for all the pages of your WordPress eCommerce website? If not, you must fix this immediately. There are several tools like Yoast SEO that guides you to write optimized meta tags.
F. Sitemap
The sitemap is a file that tells search engines about all the pages that must be indexed by their robots/crawlers. Basically, this file helps search engines to travel to different pages of a website. Useful SEO plugins like Yoast SEO can help you to achieve this job. Creating and deploying sitemaps on the server through these SEO plugins is just a few clicks job.
#3 Users Experience
A. Checkout Process
I am sure that you don’t want your visitors to step out of your eCommerce website because of the complicated or ugly checkout process. A checkout form is considered the backbone of any eCommerce website and so is the case with WordPress websites too.
Before you launch your eCommerce website & invest money in its advertisements, do make sure to put yourself in the user’s shoes and think if your checkout process needs some enhancements. Having a simple checkout process for an eCommerce website results in more sales & conversions and fewer abandoned orders.
B. Forms
Have you checked all the forms of your WordPress eCommerce website? Do make sure that all the form submission results are being processed properly and saved as well. Also, check all the forms should have appropriate validation (mandatory fields) so that you can receive all the necessary information of every user that would help you to contact them in the future.
C. Cross-Browser Testing
This is something where most web developers do not invest their time although Cross-Browser Testing is an important part of QC.
What exactly is cross-browser testing?
Cross-browser testing is a process in which the testers or web developers compare & analyze the website functionality and styles across multiple browser platforms and operating systems. This process helps them to identify and fix any potential discrepancies.
Since you never know which browser your visitor may use to browse your eCommerce website, it’s important to test & fix the website for all the major browsers such as Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc.
D. Payment Gateway
It would be very sad if your eCommerce website is attractive, supports all browsers & devices, and attracts a targeted audience but your potential customers are not able to pay swiftly. If your customers are not able to pay online, the whole objective of getting an eCommerce website would be wasted. Isn’t it?
Do make sure to test by completing a few transactions yourself. BTW, this reminds me that you must also provide your customers with several options to pay online. Think about their convenience & preferences, rather than yours.
Final Words
An eCommerce website carries huge responsibilities of making profits for any organization. Wouldn’t it be worth testing each & every aspect of your online store before you present it to the whole world? Think about it!
