Magento website owners often fail to do recurring cleanup tasks. I’ve never worked with a company that had this dialed down. Keeping your user-submitted data in check is very important for multiple reasons, ranging from site speed to usability and finally to security.

I’m going to explain what should be checked, how regularly, and why so you can be one of the few that do things right.

On-site Search

Search keywords should be checked, ideally, every week and there are 2 main tasks.

1. Checking top searched keywords

Sort your keywords by the number of uses (descending) and make sure that the customers get proper search results on each of them. Is one of those top keywords a specific product SKU? Then implement a redirect so that when people search for one SKU, they go to the product page directly.

Tip! Create redirects for all your CMS Pages.

examples:

  • “shipping”, “shipping cost” should go to your Shipping Policy page
  • “returns”, “returns policy”, “free returns”, “restocking fee” should go to your returns policy page
  • “coupons”, “promos”, “promotions” should go to a Promotions page highlighting your long term promos like X% off for new subscribers
2. Checking for spam search keywords.

These can include numbers or pieces of code. Examples: “<script”, “<a”, “<svg”, “javascript”, “<img”, “iframe”, “string”, “char code”.

This step is very important because it will protect you from hacks that use these strings of code. It will also keep your search index clean and fast.

Customers and subscribers

Be sure to check on your new customers and subscribers weekly. You need to be on the lookout for fake customers or subscribers automatically created by spambots. Not only do these need to be removed but you need to identify the source and deal with it as soon as possible.

Not doing the above will surely ruin your domain reputation and affect your Email Marketing efforts and it will keep your site under attack, loading the server and increasing page loading times.

How-To? Deal with spam bots

  1. Google reCaptcha V3 – implement this invisible reCaptcha on your site to decrease the number of fake accounts being created but be sure to still check daily – spam bots evolve, I’m already seeing spam related activity on some websites that have already implemented this
  2. Implement a firewall like Cloudflare – even the free account will offer protection from a big chunk of the spam bots out there.

Product Reviews

Checking product reviews weekly is also important.

  • Find spam reviews, clean them up, isolate why they are there in the first place, and block spam bots
  • Check and reply to your customer reviews – this will add content to your site which will improve your SEO and it will help with customer confidence (improving sales)
  • If you are not getting any product reviews then make sure they work and then implement an email marketing automation flow to get customers to leave reviews.

There you go! Do these 3 simple checks on a weekly basis and keep user-submitted data clean and you will be in the top 1% of stores that know what they’re doing.

Still not sure about what to do next? Reach out to me below and I’ll have a look to help set you on the right path!