Magento Launching Checklist (both Magento 1 & Magento 2)

Uploading Magento with many data is a time-consuming task, and we don’t want to do this task again and again. But, in fact, there are a lot of Magento developers have to upload their Magento site many times to get the perfect web store because of there are too many bugs occur when we upload a big site like Magento to host.

In this post, I will give you guys a necessary launching checklist of a Magento E-commerce store to make it as much smooth as possible (both Magento 1 & Magento 2).

System Requirements

Operating System	Linux distributions such as RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, and so on.
Composer	To develop Magento extensions or anyone who wants to contribute to the Magento 2 codebase, composer is needed. It is highly recommended to use the latest stable version of the composer.
Web servers	Apache 2.2 or 2.4 In addition, the Apache mod_rewrite module must be enabled. mod_rewrite enables the server to perform URL rewriting. nginx 1.8 or later.
Database	MariaDB and Percona MySQL 5.6 Magento 2.1.2 or later versions are compatible with MySQL 5.7.
PHP	Magento 2.0  7.0.2, 7.0.6–7.0.x, 5.6.x 5.5.22–5.5.x Magento 2.1  7.0.2 7.0.4 7.0.6–7.0.x 5.6.5–5.6.x
Required PHP extensions	bc-math curl gd, ImageMagick 6.3.7 (or later) or both intl mbstring mcrypt mhash openssl PDO/MySQL SimpleXML soap xml xsl zip PHP 7 only: json Iconv
SSL	A valid security certificate is required for HTTPS.
Mail server	Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) or an SMTP server.
Redis	Version 3.0 for page caching and session storage (the latter supported by Magento version 2.0.6 and later only)
Varnish	Version 3.5 or latest stable 4.x version for page caching
Memcached	Latest stable version for session storage with either Memcache or Memcached PHP extensions (latest stable version)

Latest Version

Before taking your store Live, make sure that your store is using the latest Magento version with the updated security patch. You can check your current Magento version here.

Store URLs

Check all admin and storefront URLs to work properly and flashing 200 OK status. Also, check their www and http/https statuses. All the base URLs stored in core_config_data need to be updated or it will be redirected back to the staging site or currently setup URL. Make sure to check for the trailing forward slash. – Store backend URL: At the time of installation, you have setup the admin URL same as storefront URL trailed by “/admin”. I strongly recommend to change it from “/admin” to something that is easily remembered and hard to guess by users. – Store Frontend URL: It is generally the domain you have purchased but sometimes the current store falls under subdomain or directory. Double check the storefront URL as well.

Stores → Configurations → General → Web → Base URLs → Base URL

See detail here

Set up SSL

As your Magento store may accept online payments for the products you offer. Implementing trusted and signed security certificate is must safeguard customers’ personal data from being hacked. Install 100% trusted security certificate. You need to setup secured frontend URL in configuration.

Stores → Configuration → General → WEB → Base URLs (Secure) → URL with https.

See detail here

Create and test 301 redirects

After building 301’s, test them to ensure our new target URLs are going to functional pages, and fix any broken redirects or redirect chains before go-live.

See detail here

404 Error Page

Edit the 404 error page and add content according to your requirement before taking the store live.

Stores → Configurations → Web → Default Pages [check all settings]

SEO Audit/Review

– Title tag & meta description Check title tags & meta descriptions – do they need to be requested/edited/created?

– Robots.txt Check the robots.txt file. Ensure everything is set up correctly and robots are not blocked from accessing the site.

– Sitemap.xml Create Google sitemap from catalog → Google Sitemap and point Google to your webmaster tools. You can also automate regenerating sitemap from Stores → Configuration → Catalog → XML Sitemap.

– 301 redirect Set up 301 redirects in the .htaccess file for subdomain (www vs non-www).

– Broken links Identify & fix any broken links.

– Schema markup Review any schema markup for accuracy, add it if needed.

Google Tools

Magento is integrated with Google API to allow your business to use Google Analytics and Google AdWords.

Stores → Configuration → Sales → Google API → Google Analytics

See detail here

Set up email

– Email Addresses: Staging environment needs to be tested before going live and thus for testing purpose, you may have set up some testing Emails. You need to replace all communication Emails with the actual business Email addresses of the store. You will be able to find these in

Stores → Configuration → General → Store Email Addresses

Even you need to change the Contact Us Email address from

Stores → Configuration → General → Contacts

– Email Template: Update default Email templates to reflect your brand. Also, change default logos in Email templates.

Cart Options

Check the configuration of cart settings and functionalities, and be able to add, edit, and remove products from the cart with ease, all while the total amount of purchase is calculated correctly.

Shipping Methods

Configure, enable and test all the shipping methods your business needs to be used. Check backend settings here:

Stores → Configurations → Sales → Shipping Methods Stores → Configurations → Sales → Shipping Settings

See detail here

Payment Methods

Add, configure and test all the payment methods you want customers to use on your store for payments. Also, check all the payments are ready to go live from the testing mode.

Stores → Configurations → Sales → Payment Methods See detail here

Tax Settings

Enabled sales taxes based on the requirement of your business. These can be found in:

Stores → Configuration → Sales → Taxes

See detail here

Inventory

Your store products need to be managed for stock based on your requirements. There are 2 options to manage stock: – Manage inventory without stock management
– Manage inventory with stock management

Go to Products → Catalog → [choose a product in EDIT mode from grid] → ‘Advanced Inventory’

See detail here

Extensions and licenses

Disable all the unwanted Magento extensions you enabled for testing purpose. Also, check for the licenses of the enabled extensions to work for production or live mode as well.

Stores → Configurations → Advanced → Advanced → Disable Modules Output

Cron (Scheduled Tasks)

Cron jobs are used to process email, catalog price rules, newsletters, customer alerts, Google sitemaps, update currency rates, and so on, Make sure that Cron jobs are set to run at the appropriate time interval, in minutes.

See detail here

Caching and Indexing

Generally, developers have a habit of disabling cache and indexing while developing websites. Make sure to enable cache and refresh in the live site. Also, check for the readiness of indexing.

System → Cache Management System → Index Management

See detail here

Remove Test Data

Remove all unwanted testing orders, products and customers you have created in the staging environment.

Minify And Merge CSS

Make use of a CSS compressor. This can also help in reducing site load time. Keep two versions of the CSS, one in readable form e.g. styles.css.orig and then have a minified version styles.css. you can perform the changes from

Stores → Configuration → Advanced → Developer → CSS Settings

Minify And Merge JavaScript

The most important factor to reduce site load time is minifying & Merge the number of HTTP requests. Keep requests down by flushing JavaScript files into a single one from here:

Stores → Configuration → Advanced → Developer → JavaScript Settings

PHP Configuration

Set the reasonable value for memory_limit and max_execution_time to easily carry out heavy operations successfully.

Database Backup and Restore

Inhabit some technique for timely backup and restore the database.

Done! Above are 21 important things that you need to check in the Magento launching checklist before making your Magento store go-live. I hope that this post can help you not only saving your time but also creating for you a new habit before finishing any task: always having the checklist to ensure that you will not forget anything.

Thank you for participating!

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References:

1. https://docs.magento.com/m2/ce/user_guide/magento/prelaunch-checklist.html
2. https://magecomp.com/blog/magento-2-website-prelaunch-checklist/
3. https://magenticians.com/magento-2-launch-checklist/
4. https://www.paradoxlabs.com/blog/15-point-checklist-smooth-magento-sitelaunch/

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