A shop that is idle is a website. A shop that is selling is a system, and it fails in ways an ordinary site never does: the order e-mail that never arrives, the cart showing somebody else’s, the stock counting down with nobody watching. This is the list worth going through before you tell anyone they can buy.
The pre-opening list
| 1 |
One complete test order, placed while logged out of your admin account, on a phone, from cart to confirmation e-mail.
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| 2 |
Shop e-mails genuinely arriving. Order received, processing and complete, to a mailbox that is not yours.
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The legal pages written: terms of sale, returns, privacy and cookies.
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| 6 |
A visible contact on every page, with somebody on the other end.
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| 7 |
The shop opened on somebody else’s phone, not yours. Yours has a warm cache and will lie to you.
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E-mail is what fails most
It is the commonest fault in a new shop, and the quietest: the customer pays, gets no confirmation, and assumes it went wrong. WordPress sends its automatic e-mail through a route many receiving servers do not trust.
| What to do |
Why |
| Send over authenticated SMTP |
An SMTP plugin makes WordPress use a real mailbox instead of sending unidentified |
| Use an address on your own domain |
Sending as another domain’s address is the recipe for landing in spam |
| Have SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the domain |
They are what tells the recipient the message really is yours: SPF, DKIM and DMARC |
| Test to three different mailboxes |
What lands in one can go to spam in another |
Speed, where it counts
| Measure |
Effect |
| A current PHP version |
The cheapest change and the most noticeable: changing PHP version |
| Images shrunk before uploading |
In a shop, images are most of the page weight |
| Page caching, minus cart and checkout |
Everything else can be served from cache without trouble |
| Few plugins |
Every plugin runs on every page. In a shop that multiplies |
| A tidy database |
Drafts, revisions and old orders pile up and weigh |
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Badly configured caching is the most expensive fault a shop can have. Cart, checkout and customer account always stay out of the cache, and that goes for the caching plugin, for any server-side cache and for Cloudflare: the cache that fools you.
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Security, because a shop is a better target
| 2 |
Update core, themes and plugins. On a shop, a postponed update is money at risk, not just a website.
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| 3 |
Delete what you do not use. A deactivated theme is still code on the server.
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| 4 |
Review who holds an administrator account. A forgotten admin from an old job is an open door.
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After you open
Put it in the diary, once a week: look for orders stuck in odd statuses, confirm the e-mails still go out, glance at the statistics and place one test purchase. Five minutes. It is what separates the shop that works from the shop that stopped a month ago with nobody noticing.
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