Magento Server Maintenance: 15 Best Practices and Tips
Magento Server Maintenance: 15 Best Practices and Tips. The purpose of this article is to present the top tips and best practices of Magento server maintenance that contribute to achieving and maintaining the optimal store performance. We analyse best steps businesses shall take to effectively manage their resources, avoid performance issues and ensure the security of customer data.
Get ready for a deeper insight into the world of Magento server maintenance best practices. Top tips that are presented below contribute dramatically to a better performance of your server.
Let’s start with Magento Server Maintenance: 15 Best Practices for Keeping Your Server Running Smoothly.
Introduction to what is Magento?
Magento is a popular eCommerce platform used by many online merchants around the world. If you have a Magento site, you need to ensure continuous maintenance to keep it running without any security issues. Let’s note, that a maintenance mode is a special mode in Magento used to temporarily shut down the software for maintenance. For e-commerce platforms, this is an important notification to customers and search engine indexing robots that the site is under construction and will be available as soon as possible.
Magento maintenance mode is one of the 4 modes: Default, Developer mode, Production Mode and maintenance Mode.
What is Magento Maintenance Mode?
In nutshell a Magento Maintenance mode happens to stop access on temporary basis. Most commonly during an upgrade or updates. It is a vital part and helpful option for DevOps during development and testing. When a platform is in maintenance mode, there is a message that displays “Temporarily Unavailable Page.” During that time your site is offline. Maintenance mode is ideal for big updates, patches and changes to your website.
15 Best Magento Maintenance Checklist and Tips
So here are some of the Magento maintenance and support best practices you should know about.
1. Find JS Errors
Start your maintenance check by finding JS errors. That way you are making sure all web parts are interacting with each other as they should. Undergo this test on every page, starting from Homepage to Login then categories, product pages and finalising on Check put pages.
2. Take Advantage and use a Reliable Host
Next, choose a web host that gives you the option of uninterrupted hosting service. Do not pick a web host just because it gives you cheaper plans. It is vital not to lose customers and reputation just because you have chosen cheaper services. In addition, make sure your web host offers professional support services 24/7 so that you have the ability to get help when needed. This helps to avoid site crashes and restoration of your site as quickly as possible, even if it encounters a crash. Have your web host to have specialized staff for customer support.
3. Secure Your Server Environment
It is important to keep the Magento server secure, at all times. Be sure you don’t have any other software running in the background that could compromise your Magento server. It is also recommended that you don’t use FTP. Please use the more secure communication protocols, like SFTP for file management instead. It is not recommended to use easy passwords to hack. Instead use strong passwords and preferably change them on regular intervals. Also, keep tabs on any problems reported by Magento that relate to software, configuration and installation.
Do not use other software on the same server with Magento. In addition, be sure that all applications are updated.
4. Hire a Magento Maintenance Company
In order to support and hold Magento security at the high level, hire a specialist company. Reasons often are it is hard for you to take care of your ecommerce server because you don’t have enough time or you are not technically well trained to control it. The specialist maintenance services takes care of Magento updates, speed and security.
Hire a company that is well known for just Magento maintenance and support. A service with really good experience in handling these issues.
5. Remove Test Products
Test products are definitely engaging at the beginning. The moment everything stabilizes just remove them. Test products, there is a need to do a lot of reporting and testing that may slow down front end queries. Also, they will take up a fair amount of disk space, making order processing slowing down your system. So, the best option is to remove test products so that performance and speed improves significantly for Magento website.
6. Update your Magento Site to the Latest Version
By far the main and most beneficial practice you bring to Magento maintenance and support is undoubtedly to update your site to the latest version. It protects your site from cybercriminals and cyber attacks. This is all done through security patches. Anytime Magento releases new versions of updates it lets in some security patches that work in a remedial way. On the other hand, other benefits we encounter thanks to updating your site regularly are:
- Improved performance.
- Key integrations.
- Immediate purchases.
- Mobile friendliness, etc.
How to update to the latest version please follow this link to perform latest Magento 2.4.6 upgrade here.
7. Fix Bugs/Glitches Urgently
A dedicated Magento maintenance and support agency is another important step to avoid errors and glitches, or to help you configure Magento to implement them immediately. Their domain is to customize Magento support service and control the status in time to maintain adequate performance. Therefore, when you regularly fix glitches, errors get updated and repaired in efficient timescales. So, having a dedicated support and maintenance team analyses every tiniest line of code to detect problems and fix them within a few hours.
8. Check and Review Your Code Integrity
Overall, well analysed and integrated code is undoubtedly a key factor in giving you the ability to have the perfect application. The purpose of code integrity is to measure how high the quality of the source code is and, above all, to check whether there have been any modifications to the underlying file. If the code has integrity then developers are confident that the code is written as it should be to deliver a Magento website without any errors.
Furthermore, checking the integrity of the code is done using integration tests and unit tests. If you run into trouble, it is a good idea to ask for Magento 2 Website Maintenance Service support. They help to perform the task in accordance with the best solutions and conclude with a detailed report including problems, file paths and suggested solutions.
9. Test and optimize Magento speed
High site speed allows visitors to easily navigate, search and load product information without hassle. They can then make a purchase with great ease and speed. Unfortunately, slow loading is one of the main reasons where your website suffers and therefore increases your shopping cart rejection rate.
Therefore, check page speed as a very important step on the Magento website maintenance checklist.
How to test your Magento website loading speed? Follow this link.
10. Perform a Code Validation and Review for Clean Code
When it comes to other most important maintenance practices for Magento to prevent crashes, errors etc is code validation. A vital health check to make sure the coding of the page is compliant with Magento coding guidelines. Through this process, you find out if the codes are clean, including custom code and code for third-party modules/motifs.
11. Perform Magento Security Check
To keep Magento security is strengthened under all circumstances it is imperative to perform security checklist. Even a minimal security vulnerability freezes the entire workflow of your shop and limit operation along with profit generation. Additionally, Magento security patches should be regularly performed, especially with new versions to maintain the highest level of security.
12. Review Third Party Modules and Extensions
In addition to version updates along with security, reviewing third party modules is one of the Magento site maintenance priorities, also ensures the overall health of your site. As well as check the module’s enabled or disabled status and version. There may be times where a disabled module is no longer needed, in which case you should consider removing it to optimise the code on your site. On the other hand, the best Magento 2 maintenance practice is to update it to all the latest version of enabled modules that are suitable for your version of Magento.
13. Fix Broken Links & Images
Maintenance really includes you removing non functioning links and images data on your website. There are times when links mentioned in the content are available, resulting in a broken link. Therefore, your shop may have broken images with incorrect file paths, resulting in a poor user experience.
Non functioning links on a website provide negative signals to the indexing robot and badly affect your shop’s ranking in search engines. Therefore it is imperative to find and fix these non working links and images on the website, in order to improve the customer experience for users and to improve SEO performance above all. Consider using tools such as Google Search Console and Ahrefs to find non working images and links.
14. Check Cron Configuration and Status of Last Execution
The use of Cron has become popular and it is a really great feature from Linux. It automatically schedules actions in the future and helps save a lot of time for your shop. We have several Magento features that undoubtedly require Cron tasks, such as:
- Automatic currency exchange rate updates.
- Alerts/notifications to customers.
- Catalogue price rules.
- Google site map generation.
It may happen that you get an alert about a message that Cron is not working. In this case, you should immediately ask the Magento support team to fix it.
15. Perform Usability Audit (Testing)
Last but not least in best tips and practices to keeping your Magento server running smooth is doing a testing. In broad terms it is to make sure every function of your website is working well and there is no errors or loss of performance for users.
Magento Server Maintenance: 15 Best Practices and Tips Conclusion
Magento Server maintenance is an ongoing process and it is essential to be vigilant and proactive at all times. It is an essential part of all eCommerce stores. However, maintenance doesn’t necessarily have to disrupt your store functions. Regularly review your server’s performance, security, and scalability to address changing requirements and potential threats. Following these best practices ensures that your Magento website runs smoothly and provides a positive experience for your customers.
