WooCommerce maintenance checklist: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly

When we open a slow or fragile WooCommerce store, the history is nearly always the same. It was built, it launched, it sold, and then for three years nobody was responsible for it. Nobody neglected it on purpose. It just wasn't anyone's job. This checklist is what that job consists of, written for owners who want to know what should be happening, whether they do it themselves or pay someone to.

We have grouped it by how often each thing needs doing. Nothing here is exotic, and most stores skip most of it.

Every day

You need a backup you could actually restore. That means files and database, stored somewhere other than the server they back up, and kept long enough that a problem you notice on Friday can be undone from Monday's copy. A backup plugin writing to the same disk as the store won't help when that disk fails.

Uptime should be monitored from outside: something that loads your store from the internet every few minutes and tells a person when it fails. Your customers shouldn't be the alarm.

Someone should also look at the error log. PHP and WooCommerce both log their problems, and a store that has written the same warning ten thousand times a day for a year is usually slow for the same reason.

Every week

Apply updates to WordPress, WooCommerce, the theme and every plugin, first on a staging copy and then on the live store. Updates applied blindly break checkouts, and skipped updates leave known security holes open. Testing on staging means you don't have to pick one of those risks.

Then check the purchase path. Add a product, go to checkout, and confirm that the payment methods and shipping rates appear. It takes two minutes and catches most of what updates break.

Scheduled actions deserve a look as well. WooCommerce runs a lot in the background, such as subscription renewals, abandoned-cart emails and stock sync. When that scheduler backs up, orders quietly stop doing things they are supposed to do.

Every month

Measure the speed the way Google does. Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile for the home page, your top category and your top product page, three runs each, and write down the middle result. A store that is drifting slower shows it here months before customers complain.

Go through the plugin list. Every active plugin runs code on every page load, whether it does anything useful or not. For each one, ask whether it is still maintained, whether you still need it, and whether two of them could be one. Most slow stores carry a dozen they no longer need.

The database needs a review too, mainly in three places. Plugins leave autoloaded rows in wp_options that load on every single request, and uninstalled plugins rarely clean up after themselves. Expired transients sit in the same table and cause the same problem. And wp_postmeta grows with every product, order and variation, so it needs indexes that fit the queries WooCommerce actually runs.

Check users and access. Former staff, former agencies and former developers should not be able to log into your store once they no longer work with you.

If someone else maintains the store, read their monthly report. It should cover speed scores, load times, and what changed and why. If nobody can tell you what changed on your store last month, nobody is maintaining it.

Every quarter

Test a restore by taking a backup and bringing it up on a staging server. The day you need a backup is the wrong day to find out it was incomplete.

Check the PHP version. PHP versions reach end of life on a schedule, and from that day they get no security fixes. The store should be on a supported version, and its plugins should support that version.

Check the caching. Object caching and full-page caching both help WooCommerce a great deal, and both break it when they cache the cart, the checkout or the account pages. After three months of plugin updates, confirm that those exclusions are still right.

Look at the hosting. Is the store still on the shared plan it launched on? A host that oversold the machine shows up as speed that varies with the time of day. Has your traffic grown past what the server was sized for?

Once, and then keep it

Three things only need setting up once, and everything above is easier with them in place. The first is a staging copy, where updates and restores get tested and a new plugin gets tried before it meets real customers. The second is a repository for the code, with the theme and any custom plugins in version control so a change can be seen and undone, and with access that belongs to you rather than to whoever built the store. The third is written documentation of what runs where, which services the store depends on and who has access to what. It can be short, as long as it exists.

Doing it versus buying it

An owner can do all of this. Most don't. It isn't hard, but it is nobody's job on a Tuesday afternoon, and the store seems fine right up until it isn't. That gap is what we sell.

Our WooCommerce maintenance plans put the store on a dedicated server we manage and handle the list above as routine work: WordPress, WooCommerce and plugin updates, daily backups, uptime and security monitoring, caching set up around the cart and checkout, and a monthly report of what changed and why. Store Care is from $395 a month: a person does every update on a copy of the store and places a test order before it goes live, but it has no engineering hours. Managed Engineering is from $950 a month depending on your store's revenue, and adds updates tested on staging first, engineering hours, performance tuning, small fixes and direct access to your engineer. There is no contract and no minimum term.

Every store starts with a free store review, which is essentially this checklist run against your store by us, with written findings ranked by business impact. If the review finds the store needs real work before it can be maintained, you get a fixed quote for that too. If you want to see where you stand before talking to anyone, the speed check on our pricing page covers the first monthly item in about 30 seconds.