Shopify maintenance: the monthly checklist that keeps a store from quietly breaking

Shopify's great advantage over a self-hosted store is that the platform looks after itself. Hosting, SSL, security patches, checkout, PCI compliance: not your problem. It is easy to conclude from that that the store needs no maintenance at all, and that is how stores end up with a homepage banner for Mother's Day in September and a cart that fails on Safari.

What needs looking after is the layer you control: the theme, the apps, the content, and the settings. Here is the checklist we run for stores on our care plans. Most owners could run it themselves; the point of writing it down is so you can decide whether you want to.

Weekly (ten minutes)

Place a test order. Add a product to the cart on your phone, go to checkout, stop before paying. If anything looks wrong, you want to know on Monday, not from a customer on Saturday. Once a month, complete the order with a 100% discount code and check the confirmation email.

Check the orders that need attention. Unfulfilled orders older than your promised time, failed subscription charges, chargebacks. Shopify's home screen shows these; look at it.

Read the contact-form submissions. Obvious, and routinely forgotten when they go to an inbox nobody checks.

Monthly (an hour)

Rotate what is promoted. The homepage hero, the featured collection, and the announcement bar should reflect this month, not last season. For most shops this is the single highest-value hour of maintenance, because it is the difference between a site that looks alive and one that does not.

Review the app list. Open Settings, then Apps. For each app ask: do we use this, and is it still worth the price? Uninstall what is dead. Apps you remove often leave code behind in the theme; a developer can strip it, and it is worth doing because leftover scripts slow the site.

Check for a theme update. Online Store, then Themes. If an update is available, read what changed. If your customizations are sections and settings, update a copy of the theme first, check it, then publish. If your customizations are in the code, this is a developer job.

Look at the speed score. Shopify shows one on the Themes page. It is crude but directional. A sudden drop usually means an app was added or an enormous image was uploaded.

Check the inventory edge cases. Products at zero that should not be, products that are sold out but still featured, variants with no image.

Skim analytics. Not to agonize over, just to notice: which pages people land on, where they leave, what sold. Shopify's built-in reports are enough for this.

Quarterly (a morning)

Broken links. Run a crawler (Screaming Frog's free tier handles a small store) or use Shopify's URL redirect report for 404s. Fix or redirect what you find. Old product URLs that no longer exist are the usual culprit.

Policies and legal pages. Does the shipping policy say what you actually do now? Did the refund window change? Is the privacy policy still accurate about what apps you run?

Email templates. Order confirmation, shipping confirmation, subscription notices. Read them as a customer. Fix the one with the old logo.

Delivery and tax settings. Zones, fees, cutoffs, holiday blackout dates for the coming quarter. Tax rates change; Shopify updates rates automatically but new nexus rules do not set themselves.

Accessibility spot check. Tab through checkout with a keyboard. Run the free Lighthouse audit in Chrome. Fix the contrast and label issues it reports; they are usually small.

Back up what matters. Shopify does not provide a full store backup. Export products, customers, and orders to CSV and keep them somewhere safe. Download a copy of the theme. Apps exist for this ($10 to $20 a month); for a small store, a quarterly export is enough.

Seasonally and as needed

Seasonal collections and content. New products in, retired products out, the collection descriptions rewritten so they are not about the wrong season. For shops whose whole catalogue turns over quarterly (florists, farm stands, seasonal retail) this is the main ongoing work, and it is why our Growth care plan is built around about an hour of changes a month.

After adding any app. Re-run the weekly checkout test. Most cart and checkout problems date to the day an app was installed.

When Shopify announces something. Checkout extensibility, new theme architecture, a deprecated API that an old app depends on. These come with months of notice and are easy to miss if nobody is reading the emails. Someone should be.

What goes wrong when nobody does this

The failures are rarely dramatic. A store that has been left alone for a year typically has: a homepage promoting a past holiday, two apps nobody remembers installing (one of them broken), a speed score in the 30s, a policy page with a wrong phone number, and a subscription app whose failed charges have been quietly emailing customers for months. None of it is hard to fix. All of it was costing sales.

Doing it yourself versus paying for it

Everything above is doable by an owner with an hour a month. If that sounds fine, do it; you know the shop best.

If you would rather not, that is what a care plan is. Ours are $40 a month for updates and email support, or $99 for about an hour of changes a month with priority support and a quarterly review. Both are twelve-month plans, and both start with a takeover review if we did not build the store, so we know what we are maintaining. Larger work, a redesign or an integration, is quoted separately at $120 an hour.

The question to ask is not "can I do this" but "will I." If the honest answer is no, get in touch before the Safari cart bug, not after.