Advice on patching high traffic Woocommerce site

  • Resolved appelby1010

    (@thegreatdanton)


    3 years, 8 months ago

    Hi there,

    I would just like to get some advice in relation to patching a WordPress Woocommerce website. I will soon be launching a site for a client that will generate quite a lot of traffic, in the region of 5k – 10k hits per week, with potentially a lot of transactions through the site.

    I would like to get some advice in relation to to best practice around patching the Woocommerce website. I will be hosting the website on WPEngine and there I have three environments (Dev, Staging and Production).

    When the website is live all the plugins and WordPress core files and theme files will be up to date. However after a few weeks it is inevitable that plugins, theme and the WordPress core files will need to be updated.

    Is the best practice here to put a notice on the site saying that a website will be down for a period of 1 to 2 hours. I then take a backup of the production environment and then push it down to the development environment, make the updates, push to staging, test the updates to make sure everything is working and then push back up into the live environment?

    I would appreciate any advice in relation to this. Is there any possibility of avoiding downtime?

    How often should WordPress be updated like this?

    Thank you

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Stef

    (@serafinnyc)

    Hey there, Thanks for posting in the forum

    When the website is live all the plugins and WordPress core files and theme files will be up to date. However after a few weeks it is inevitable that plugins, theme and the WordPress core files will need to be updated.

    Never assume that they won’t need updating. Technology is happening very fast and there are always changes happening. So it is probable.

    Best practice is to take your production site and put it in maintenance mode and then copy it to the staging environment and do your updates and testing there. If everything is good to go then all you need to do is copy it right back and open back up.

    How often should WordPress be updated like this?

    You should wait a few days before updating any new versions of either core. There will be bugs here and there and I find myself waiting a week in some cases. However, that is up to you. Just don’t wait too long.

    Once you get in a rhythm and know your plugins well you’ll be able to update in some cases without having to copy over to stage.

    Best of luck with everything.

    Thread Starter appelby1010

    (@thegreatdanton)

    Thanks Stef,

    I appreciate your reply. Putting it into maintenance mode is probably the best solution here. I fully understand plugins will certainly need to be updated so I’m not underestimating that.

    By any any chance are you familiar with any online services that provide woocommerce monthly maintenance support? I would like to hand off the maintenance of the site to an external person or company as I won’t have the time to maintain it. No worries if not.

    Thank you

    • This reply was modified 3 years, 8 months ago by appelby1010.
    Stef

    (@serafinnyc)

    You’re very welcome.

    There are literally hundreds of thousands of us that offer that. It’s all a matter of finding them. Unfortunately we’re not allowed to say who in the forum.

    Thread Starter appelby1010

    (@thegreatdanton)

    Hi Stef, no problem. I completely understand. Thank you

    dougaitken

    (@dougaitken)

    Automattic Happiness Engineer

    Hey @thegreatdanton

    We do have this generic page in the WooCommerce.com documentation for starters – https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-scaling-faqs/

    For advice around this, I would recommend reaching out to one of our vetted developers on our Customizations page, join the WooCommerce Slack Community, or join the Facebook group:

    https://woocommerce.com/customizations/
    https://woocommerce.com/community-slack/
    https://www.facebook.com/groups/advanced.woocommerce/

    Alternatively, if you search online for “Scaling WooCommerce” – there will be a few solid articles and YouTube videos returned that may help.

    As this isn’t something we can directly help with, in the forums, I will mark this thread as Resolved for now, but please do open a new one if you need any more help!

    Thanks,

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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