PrestaShop store maintenance: what it really includes and how much time it takes

“We have maintenance” can mean very different things. For some agencies it is a monthly fee in exchange for being reachable if something fails. For others it is a real, regular review of the store. The difference shows the day a security advisory comes out for a module you have installed, or the day the store stops sending emails and nobody has noticed.

Real maintenance is preventive work: what is done so that incidents do not happen. Let us look at the tasks it consists of, how often, and how to estimate how much time your store needs.

The tasks, grouped by frequency

Continuous (monitoring)

• Availability: the store responds and the checkout works. It is not enough for the home page to load.
• Errors: PHP errors, 500 responses, payments that do not end up as orders.
• Security: new employees, modules installed without anyone knowing, modified files.
• Expiry dates: SSL certificate, domain, payment gateway and API keys.

This is automated with alerts. The human work is dealing with whatever gets flagged.

Weekly or fortnightly

• Review security advisories from PrestaShop and from the authors of your modules.
• Check that backups have been made and are the expected size.
• Look at the logs of accumulated errors and scheduled tasks that have failed.
• A test order or, at least, checking that the latest orders followed their normal flow.

Monthly

• Update modules that have a new version, first on a test copy.
• Review performance: load times for the home page, category, product page and checkout, and for the back office.
• Clean up whatever grows unchecked: old abandoned carts, logs, connection statistics.
• Review employees and access: who still needs to log in and with what permissions.

Quarterly or every six months

• Update PrestaShop to the latest maintenance release of your branch.
• Review the PHP version and its end-of-support date.
• Restore a backup in a separate environment to check that it works.
• Module inventory: which are used, which have been abandoned by their author, which are surplus.

When the time comes

Major version jumps (from 1.7 to 8, from 8 to 9) are not ordinary maintenance: they are projects, with their own inventory, rehearsal and switch-over day. But good maintenance makes them much easier, because the store reaches the jump with everything up to date.

How much time it takes

There is no figure that applies to every store. What matters most:

To estimate it, the practical approach is to measure for a few months: record the time for each preventive task and each incident. A well-maintained store usually sees incident hours fall and prevention hours level off. One that is only touched when something fails has quiet months and months with many hours, and the latter always arrive at the worst moment.

What is worth having in writing

Maintenance that lives only in the memory of whoever does it is lost the day that person changes. Ask for, or prepare yourself, a short document with:

• Store inventory: PrestaShop and PHP version, theme and child theme, modules with their version and origin, integrations and scheduled tasks.
• Access: who has access to the back office, the server and the database, and where the credentials are kept.
• Backups: where they are, how often and when the last restore was tested.
• Changes made: what was updated and when, and what was customised (templates, overrides, server settings).
• What to do if the store goes down: who to call, in what order and how to inform customers.

With this document, any new technician understands the store in an hour instead of a week, and you always know what has been done to it.

Signs that maintenance is lacking

• Nobody can tell you which PrestaShop version your store runs or when it was last updated.
• There are installed modules nobody remembers the purpose of.
• Errors are discovered because a customer calls.
• Every update is a drama because it is done only now and then and piles up changes.
• Backups exist “in theory”, but nobody has ever restored one.

What to ask of whoever does it for you

• An estimate before every task that is not routine.
• A report of what was done: what was updated, what was reviewed, what was found.
• Priority for incidents over those without a contract.
• An explanation of the changes, so you do not depend on anyone for day-to-day matters.
• Hours that do not expire if they are not used in a month, or at least clear conditions.

How to handle it in PrestaShop

At Rekire, maintenance is done with technical support hour packs: the 20-hour pack suits incidents and one-off improvements, and the 50-hour pack ongoing support for performance, security and improvements. The hours do not expire and have no minimum monthly use, customers with a pack go ahead in the incident queue, before starting we tell you how many hours we estimate, and only the time worked is deducted, with details of each task. If you also want to keep Rekire's modules up to date, the annual pass gives you access for a year to every module in the catalogue, to those published during that year and to their updates; whatever you install keeps working even if you do not renew.