What Is nopCommerce Maintenance?
nopCommerce has a number of tools in the admin area of the site that allow for performing standard maintenance functions. The following options are available for performing maintenance:
- Deleting guest customers
- Deleting old exported files
- Deleting abandoned shopping carts
- Reindexing database tables
- Database backups
- Deleting previously sent emails
Screen Shot Of The nopCommerce Maintance Screen Window:
Why Should I Perform Regular Maintenance?
The largest benefit of regular maintenance is keeping your database size in check. Your store tracks shopping carts, and if they do not convert to a sale, that data is increasing the size of your database. Keeping the database size down also benefits your pocketbook. A growing database may incur an increase in hosting charges if you exceed the limit for your hosting plan. It’s also slowing down processing of some functions because it has to comb through more data to return the information that needs to be displayed on a given page.
How Do I Maintain My nopCommerce Site?
For those of you who have the time to take a hands-on approach to maintaining your store, you can access the Maintenance option under the System menu. The most beneficial functions are deleting guest customers, abandoned shopping carts, and previously sent emails, because they directly affect the database. For each of the options, you need to determine how much data you wish to keep. We suggest keeping 30 days for the guest customers and abandoned shopping carts. There’s no need to keep more since it’s really just a courtesy. Regarding deleting previously sent emails, this is something you may wish to discuss within your organization. These records are located in the Message Queue in the System menu. The message data allows you to view the messages sent, so it does hold information you may find useful.
In the video below, The Foremost Media Support team will take you on a quick guided tour of how to perform site maintenance in nopCommerce: