Going Live
This section is a list of tasks and steps to consider when going live with a solution. Not all of these will be relevant to all solutions, but many of them will and you're advised to consider each of them when moving a solution to production.
Cleanup
Before you go live, you should perform cleanup of example data which has not been repurposed to fit the solution. On integrated solutions, much of this data will have been purged at a previous stage but if not consider flushing the following:
- Product data
- Countries, languages & currencies
- Variant groups
- Product units
- Stock locations
- Custom attributes
- Etc.
You should also clean up any test data which has been generated during development - typically:
- EcomOrders
- EcomOrderLines
- Form submits
- Test users
Finally, we recommend visiting Insights > Monitoring > Health and reviewing the current data health situation for Content, Ecommerce & Users.
Disable Template Compatibility settings
Some solutions use the DW9 template compatibility settings during development. If you haven't done it already this is the time to disable these settings and fixing any issues you may encounter.
The compatibility settings are only intended for debugging purposes and may impact performance on live sites.
Logs
Clean up logs which have been generated during development – typically:
- System/Diagnostics
- System/Log
Integration
On integrated solutions you should remember to set integration jobs to log errors only, instead of the extended logs typically used during development and test. You should consider setting up e-mail notifications on errors for Live Integration, Batch and Data Integration jobs.
Finally, you must decide upon frequencies for scheduled integration jobs if you haven’t done this already.
Commerce
Don’t forget to set the payment gateways and shipping gateways to production and test the checkout flow. How this is done depends on the gateways – some require you to uncheck a Test mode checkbox on the checkout handler, others require you to switch to production in the gateway backend, and so on.
Some checkout handlers will also throw errors if asked to process an order with the same ID as an old order, so you may want to change the order number sequence or add a custom order prefix to production orders.
Security
While DynamicWeb Swift ships with most security features enabled, please don’t forget to review the security-related recommendations under Insights > Monitoring > Health > Security settings.
One of the recommendations is to make sure passwords are encrypted – for convenience reasons, this behaviour is often disabled during the QA and test phase, so please take extra care to make sure it is reenabled before going live.
Consider making form antispam settings more restrictive.
Users
On integrated solutions, you will often import users during the test phase to verify that the import works and that all the user data is placed correctly, and so on and so forth. For these initial imports you (hopefully) will not be using the setting on the User provider which sends an activation email to newly created users.
This means that before going live, you often want remove and reimport the users with the user provider setting set, so that the user base will be sent an activation email.
You should also consider reducing or removing administrator accounts which are no longer necessary in production, and/or review your permissions setup to make sure everyone has the right level of access.
SMTP
An SMTP server is a server used to send out emails. A solution which is hosted on our cloud servers will have access to our SMTP server, which mean you don’t have to supply your own SMTP details to send emails from the solution.
Please note that this account is shared between a large number of customers, so you may experience delays at peak hours. If you have a dedicated smtp server or a sendgrid account you can supply it under Settings > System > Web and HTTP > SMTP.
SEO
Generally speaking, search engine optimization should be a priority during the entire development process and while creating content.
However, before a website can be indexed by search engine crawlers you need to uncheck noindex and nofollow in the website settings. These flags are typically set during development and staging to avoid having incomplete content indexed.
You may also want to enable tracking in DW or add tracking from elsewhere.
Domain & Hosting
Check what you can do
For each website and language layer:
- Add domains
- Set the primary domain
- Transfer/set up SSL for the live domain
- Redirect the domain to solution IP
Please take into account that DNS updates can take up to 48 hours to propagate worldwide.
Misc
Consider the following:
- Switch Debug=True off globally by setting DisableDebug to true either directly in /Files/GlobalSettings.aspx or via Settings > System > Global Settings.