Best Practices For Magento Maintenance & Support

Magento has become one of the popular platforms when it comes to eCommerce. Used by some of the major brands and tech giants, the platform, no wonder, has been a blessing for online store owners. However, like every eCommerce platform, it is also susceptible to some minor issues such as speed, security and updates. If not taken care of, these can hamper the store performance, customer experience and ultimately your business.

So, as a Magento store owner, it is your responsibility to make sure whether your site or store is running smoothly and efficiently. In case your site goes down or your shop stops working, you might lose your existing as well as potential customers. Further, It’s not only about store crashes but slow responding sites as well, which are actually frustrating. Such situations can harm your revenue and brand reputation.

It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave.

Thus, a little delay or ignorance in maintenance can have a big impact. Along with this, you could experience:

Customers’ identity theft
financial loss
reputation damages
loss of merchandise
high processing fees and a lot more.

Aren’t these terrifying?

So what’s next? What should be done to avoid such a scenario?

Following a few practices could – practices that make way for an effective support and maintenance of your Magento store.

Upgrade to the Latest Version
The first maintenance and support practice you need to implement to upgrade your Magento website to the latest version. One of the major benefits of doing this is to protect your website from hackers.

7 out of 10 businesses are not prepared to respond to a cyber attack.

This is done with security patches. Every time the Magento community releases a new version, they release security patches that comprise of updates to mend and fix security issues. You need to update your current Magento to ensure that your website stays updated. Other benefits of upgrading to the latest version are:

Improved performance and scalability
Improved checkout process
Mobile friendliness
Key integrations
Instant purchase
Email marketing automation

Don’t have enough time or resources for the upgrade? Don’t worry. Hire a certified Magento developer to ensure maximum proficiency and results.

Choose a Reliable Hosting Service
Next, you need to select a reliable hosting service that comes with all the industry standard security features. Also, choose according to the system requirements of your Magento version, the size of your store and the amount of traffic you expect. However, a channel which is HTTP secured will give you added SEO benefits.

Configure Magento Site Cache
To improve and optimize site performance, it is important to configure your Magento site cache.

One such way is to select the varnish cache as it acts as a web accelerator. It is also known as the reverse HTTP proxy. The proxy helps in optimizing the speed of your Magento store by saving a copy of the page in the RAM.

Secure Server Environment
You have to keep your server safe and secure from a whole range of online and environmental threats. Your site consists of sensitive data of your customers so it’s your duty to make sure you are doing everything possible to keep them safe.

Ensure that there is no unnecessary software running in the background. It is suggested to use strong passwords instead of easy-to-decode passwords and change them from time to time.

Update Magento Extensions
Extensions are super useful but they need to be checked frequently and proactively. This will help in identifying updates and reduce the risk of low performance. Moreover, if you are planning to migrate to another version of Magento, ensure that your extensions are up-to-date with the new version.

Having mentioned the best practices for Magento support and maintenance, it’s time to know who can do this for you? Or can it be done on your own?

Well, we would suggest hiring a Magento development company because experience and expertise always speak louder. You might be able to perform some of it by yourself but some parts will still be untouched. So, it is recommended to ask for help and make the most out of your online business.