Lorvae

Lorvae did not need a new design or a rebuild. It needed someone to take care of the parts of the store that customers never see.

A growing online store collects problems quietly. Apps get installed for one campaign and never removed. People keep their logins long after they need them. The theme falls behind on updates. Backups are either not running or have never been tested.

None of this shows on the storefront, so it goes unnoticed until something breaks, and that tends to happen at checkout.

We maintained the store on a retainer, which is a fixed monthly fee for ongoing work, instead of waiting for a call when something broke. The work covered six areas.

• AppsWe reviewed every installed app for whether it was still needed, how much it slowed the store, and what data it could reach. Unused apps were removed.
• AccessWe reviewed who could log in and gave each person and each app only the access the job required. This approach is called least privilege. We kept a record of every change.
• BackupsWe set up automatic backups of products, orders, and customers. The copies were encrypted with AES-256, a widely used encryption standard, and stored so they could not be altered. Every month we restored one as a test to prove it worked.
• Security and uptimeWe watched the store's SSL certificate, which is what puts the padlock in the browser, monitored whether the store was online, and scanned the theme and apps every week for suspicious code.
• Theme updatesWe kept the theme current and tested every update on a staging store, which is a private copy of the live one. The storefront, cart, and checkout were checked there before anything went live.
• SupportA set number of hours each month for fixes, small improvements, and questions.