Keeping the holidays stable

Happy Halloween-eve.

While the holiday is different this year, it does mark my stabilization phase of the year.

Every year at the start of November I wind down major development of my Shopify apps to gets things ready for the holidays.

Even though my apps are stable from day-to-day, stabilization is a practice I learned years ago when I first started developing software. It never hurts to take the time to prevent outages.

I also use this time to work on performance trouble spots. I've already fixed a few for Repeat Customer Insights which were just rolled out this week, but there's always more performance to be found (as Google and Shopify are now telling everyone...)

While it's still early for your Shopify store, there are a few ways you can start to stabilize for the holiday season:

• Turn off and remove any storefront apps that you aren't using.
• Open every page type (homepage, product page, etc) and look for anything misformatted or out-of-place.
• Also look for any Liquid Errors showing up on your pages due to bad/missing code.
• Backup your store.
• And most importantly of all...

Resolve to not make any major changes to your storefront code or core data during the holiday season.

This includes even things that sound harmless like moving collections around. It's surprising how often small actions will end up breaking things at the worst time.

Eric Davis

P.S. If you're not sure how to tell which apps are "storefront" apps, go into Shopify Admin, then your Apps list. Click the "About" link by each app and look through what App Permissions you've approved. Storefront apps will have access to your theme's template or script tag files meaning they can edit your storefront's code.

JSON-LD for SEO shown below is an example of a Storefront app. So for example you'd want to contact me before installing it during the stabilization process (it's a safe option though) and if you already have it, make sure you're using it (you "use" it automatically as Google visits your store).