maintenance

Online store Maintenance Agreement

I’ve adopted a new Maintenance Agreement. This came about following several occasions where I suddenly found new Administrators and plugins on a site that I was maintaining. It’s come mostly from clients I hadn’t worked with for some time. Still, surprise! I understand the reasons folks have for introducing new parties to help out. To […]
Defining plugin classes

During my plugin triage work I group plugins into different classes before digging deeper into the pros and cons of each. Whether a plugin is good or bad for a particular site depends on how necessary it is, how deeply it’s being utilized, whether there’s any preferred alternative, and how difficult it would be to […]
WooCommerce maintenance

Since WooCommerce is self hosted and self maintained software it has earned somewhat a reputation for ongoing maintenance. The degree of maintenance will vary widely. I strive to build WooCommerce powered sites to be as low maintenance as possible, but there is some maintenance responsibility. I often work on catch-up projects applying neglected maintenance and […]
Video: WooCommerce simplified

I recorded a video today for my YouTube channel. Check it out if you’re interested in WooCommerce basics.
Avoid WooCommerce template overrides

There’s an irritating message we see whenever a site has modified WooCommerce template files and the WooCommerce plugin updates one or more minor versions. There can be one or more default WooCommerce template file(s) that had been copied into the child theme and the HTML code tailored for the design. It’s not unusual to see up to 10 of these conflicts on a custom designed site. I’ve even seen sites with dozens! On sites affected by this development strategy every WooCommerce core update causes fear and the responsibility to test the update on staging prior to updating on production.
Cleaning up your WooCommerce database

There’s lots you can do to improve database (DB) performance, but each change comes with risks. Always thoroughly test changes in a development environment first before making permanent database changes in production. Growth in data requires a growth in hosting to handle the scale of database size and queries. There’s only so much you can […]