As the eCommerce industry is constantly witnessing growth and evolving fast, regularly updating and maintaining your online store becomes most crucial for the eCommerce businesses to stay ahead of the competition. eCommerce businesses need to align themselves with the latest technologies so that their business doesn’t turn into oblivion. Building a website with cutting-edge Magento development services and dedicated Magento certified developers is important, but what is even more important is to have the best-in-class Magento support and maintenance for delivering a seamless and secured customer experience. With proper Magento support and maintenance services, businesses can ensure their Magento web design is up-to-date with the industry best practices to drive sales through optimized performance.
In this blog, with the help of our certified Magento developers, we have created a Magento website maintenance checklist to help you stand strong and ahead of your competition in 2022 and beyond.
- Update to Latest Version of Magento, Patches, and Extensions: Make sure to always update your Magento to the latest editions. This especially holds good for the companies who are still stuck at Magento 1.x. Adobe has stopped releasing updates for Magento 1.x which means that your site is vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
- Change Admin URL: Let’s be honest; the Admin panel is the heart of your entire website. While most of us are lazy to change the admin name from ./admin to something else, it is always important to change Admin URL from /admin to something complex which is difficult to guess for a Brute force attack.
- Enable Two Factor Authentication: Merely a user name and password is never enough, one should add an extra layer of security to it. 2-factor authentication can be checked while logging in. If 2-factor authentication was allowed, besides simply logging in via password, mobile OTP would have been asked.
- Deactivate Admin Users who do not need access anymore and change the password of all Current Admin Users: The fourth step of maintenance is to Deactivate Admin Users who do not need access anymore and change the password of all Current Admin Users. It is always important to check who has access to Magento Admin and deactivate them who do not need access and change the password of all Current Admin Users.
- Favicon: Favicons always create a value of trust amongst users subconsciously. So make sure to check if the Favicon is loading correctly or not.
- 301 Redirection and 404 Page: Check if 404 errors and 301 redirection rules are added accordingly or not. Especially for 404 pages, ensure that they are designed nicely and are in sync with the website theme.
- Deactivate Admin Users who do not need access anymore and change the password of all Current Admin Users: The fourth step of maintenance is to Deactivate Admin Users who do not need access anymore and change the password of all Current Admin Users. It is always important to check who has access to Magento Admin and deactivate them who do not need access and change the password of all Current Admin Users.
- Favicon: Favicons always create a value of trust amongst users subconsciously. So make sure to check if the Favicon is loading correctly or not.
- 301 Redirection and 404 Page: Check if 404 errors and 301 redirection rules are added accordingly or not. Especially for 404 pages, ensure that they are designed nicely and are in sync with the website theme
- Extension License: Check for all the license keys and domains to make sure they are set up properly.
- Check Cache regularly: Check the cache on the regular basis and make sure it’s cleaned to enhance the speed.
- Check Indexing: Ensure that all the indexes are working fine.
- Check Cron: The cron command-line utility, also known as cron job is a job scheduler on Unix-like operating systems. Users who set up and maintain software environments use cron to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. So while maintenance, ensure that crons are set up and working properly.
- Minification and merging of CSS & JS: Ensure CSS and JS are minified and merged. It might not make sense, but having JS & CSS minified enhances the website speed.
- Image Optimization: Make sure the images are optimized and/or delivered using image CDN and lazy load is implemented where we have heavy images.
- Check the Website load time: Check the load time of the website based on the Magento developers benchmarking.
- Enabling Crawl by Search Engine: Ensure sites are enabled to crawl by Search Engine. It will help bring in traffic which is important in website maintenance.
- SEO Check: Make sure SEO check is done thoroughly to get the best SEO score and rank top in search engines.
- Analytics and Adword tool: Ensure analytics and Adword tools are configured properly for better outcomes.
- Newsletter Subscription: Check Newsletter subscriptions are working fine and leads are getting captured. It will always help in increasing sales.
- Store Email: Ensure Store email is set properly. It gives a professional touch.
- Mobile friendly/Galen framework: Check for the mobile responsiveness. People mostly open websites on their mobile these days, so you will have to make sure you spend more time on making it responsive.
- Regression Testing: Either Create Regression test cases based on critical modules, which may affect the flow of the application or verify the end-to-end flow of HTE application, post-implementation of a new enhancement.
- Bug report: Create a spreadsheet sprint-wise and add all the Jira IDs which were raised as a bug for respective tasks.
- MFTF: Run the MFTF scripts before every sprint release and make sure they shouldn’t affect the default functionalities.
- Grammarly: Check for spellings and sentences. You don’t want to sound mature on your own website.
- Check admin system messages/warnings: Check the warning messages in the admin dashboard which the admin needs to approve.
- Ensure Core and Extension files are not modified: Check that Magento Extension files are not hacked/modified and make sure the code for a custom extension is not modified in the main file itself.
- Sanitize and Escape User Input in Code level: Always sanitize the data received from the User as those data can have major security risks of XSS, MySQL Injection, etc.
- Do not run a query or complex function in iteration: Do not run Query or complex logic in for each loop. For example, even if that query/logic takes a small time of 0.1S to execute, when it runs on 50 Products iteration it would take 5 seconds to execute. Thus to avoid unnecessary time-lapse and complexities, do not run a query or complex function in iteration.
- Create Indexer instead of fetching Price real-time: If we have any additional logic where price would be modified then do not fetch price in real time instead create an indexer and store in the database table.
- File/Image exist check through URL: Do not use file_exists to check image from URL (http://www.abc.com/def.png) as it will take time to download the image. Instead use filter_var(“http://www.abc.com/def.png“, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL) to check if the image is valid or not. file_exists can be used to check files in path not in URL.
- Have all software and packages up-to-date: Please ensure that PHP, Apache, MYSQL, and all other packages are up-to-date based on Magento’s version.
- SSL Set up: Ensure SSL is set up and website running with HTTPS secure connection.
- File and Folder permission: Check ownership and file/folder permissions are not compromised.
- Back-Ups: Make sure periodic backup of code, assets, and database are set. Backups are performed regularly and stored off-site.
- Site Monitoring tool set up: Ensure site monitoring tool is set up.
- Log checking and rotation: Please check if any major error in the log files exists and make sure to rotate them.