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Magento Maintenance: Five Tasks That Will Keep Your Store Running Smoothly

Like any complex piece of software, Magento requires a bit of maintenance every now and again. As your store evolves and your business grows, new products and customer accounts are created and deleted, extensions and themes are installed or modified, and the general day-to-day operations of the store leave their mark.
Diligently maintaining your store will ensure that it remains secure, fast, and reliable as the years go by. In this article, I’m going to focus on five of the most common tasks that Magento store owners should add to their to-do lists.

Applying Security Patches

The Magento teams regularly release security patches that fix vulnerabilities in the software. The patches are released shortly after vulnerabilities are discovered by Magento’s developers or security professionals. If you don’t install patches soon after they are released, your store may be vulnerable to attacks by criminals and to data theft.
We advise Magento store owners to monitor the Magento Security Center, which publishes the details of patches as they are released. If you are unsure how to apply a patch, take a look at our Knowledge Library article How to patch your Magento store.

Find and Fix 404 Errors

404 is the HTTP response code that web servers send to browsers when they can’t find the requested resources. Over time, you will move or delete product and content pages from your Magento store. If you aren’t careful, links from other pages on your store will be broken, resulting in 404 errors when shoppers try to visit them.
404 errors create a poor user experience and too many can have a negative impact on a store’s standing in search results. It’s a good idea to regularly use a tool like Screaming Frog’s Broken Link Checker to find and fix any 404 errors on your store.

Log Rotation

Magento logs information about what happens on a store in the database, including customer activity, orders, visits, and more. That information can be very useful, but the logs grow over time and can take up a lot of space and degrade database performance.
Magento can automatically remove stale logs, but this capability is turned off by default. If you want Magento to automatically clean its logs, find out how to turn on log cleaning in our guide to Magento database maintenance.

Backing Up

If your Magento store is compromised by bad actors or damaged by human error, it is easy to restore it from a backup. But if you don’t back up, incidents of this sort can be catastrophic.
Magento 2 has a built-in backup system that you will find in the dashboard under System -> Tools -> Backups. You can choose to backup the whole store with “System Backup”, the database and media, or just the database.
It is a good idea to perform regular system backups and to move the resulting files off your Magento server to a safe location.

Flushing The Image Cache

Magento caches product images in a dedicated cache. The Catalog Image Cache can sometimes become very large over time as new products are added and old products are deleted. Flushing the cache (removing the images) can free a large amount of disk space.
You will find the cache controls in the Magento 2 admin menu under System -> Cache Management. At the bottom of the Cache Management page is a button that will flush the Catalog Image Cache.
If you choose to flush the Catalog Image Cache in this way, there is likely to be a performance impact as Magento regenerates the cache of existing product images. You may prefer to only remove older cached images with a command such as this:

 find /path/to/magento/media/catalog/product/cache/* -type f -mtime +180 -exec rm -f {} ; 

As always, make sure you understand exactly what this command does before running it.
With regular maintenance, your Magento store will remain fast, secure, and reliable as your eCommerce business grows. Don’t forget, our expert Magento support team is on-duty round-the-clock to answer your questions.

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