Small business websites (both ecommerce and non-ecommerce) suffer thousands of dollars in losses due to non-optimized websites and functional issues. Major issues are bugs in critical website workflows such as online lead form submissions or checkout process on ecommerce websites.

Over the weekend, there was an issue where the Virtuemart shopping cart was not working for 2 days during a busy buying season.

Five lessons earned from this are as follows:

1. Make quality assurance or testing as important as the development itself. No matter how great project you may develop, if one piece of the puzzle breaks, it may negatively impact the entire project. Therefore, any time you make any changes to the website, you have to retest critical website workflows.
2. Complete website functional improvements in phases. Try not to do everything at once or always be in the development mode. Really small improvements may be easy but they require more quality assurance, project management and communication time.
3. Develop a process on regularly recheck all critical website workflows such as checkout process and form submissions. If you have frequent issues, test daily. If not, you may decide to test weekly or at least monthly. Have a documented process in place. If you’re not sure how to prioritize testing time which is very time consuming, then first try to estimate business damage and revenue loss due to any failure. This will help you quickly and easily prioritize and optimize your testing time budget.
4. Use analytics tools to narrow down the issues. When not getting any orders or leads for several days, I’ve seen some clients spend even more money on adwords or increasing their Internet marketing efforts not realizing that the issue is in their own back yard. For an ecommerce website, it’s critical to set up an ecommerce funnel visualization that allows you to see at what part of the process, users exist the checkout process. It’s obvious that all workflows won’t be always completed but it’s important to try to maximize on the number of completed website goals.
5. Have the best and available Joomla technical support and maintenance. While it’s always the best to prevent issues before they happen,  having rapid response time to issues when they are identified is critical to saving money. As a good rule of thumb,  I recommend expecting 4 hour response time 7 days a week during regular 8AM-5PM  business hours.

Over to you, what do you do to prevent business loss due to Joomla software issues?

Ogy Nikolic
Joomla Maintenance