Not every valuable piece of work is a big build. Much of keeping a store healthy is finding out why something small is wrong, and fixing it so it stays fixed. Four examples:
Search showing the wrong prices
One retailer’s search results disagreed with product pages on price. The cause was in the integration that feeds pricing to search, together with bugs in third-party modules. I fixed the integration and the module issues themselves rather than masking the mismatch in the theme.
Products rejected by Google Merchant
A supplier’s product feed had data mismatches and broken product URLs. Correcting the product data and URL generation at the source, instead of editing the feed by hand, improved their visibility in search.
A store finder that broke twice a year
A retailer’s store finder showed the wrong opening status around daylight-saving changes, a classic time-zone bug that only appears on a few days a year. Fixing the time handling properly, alongside correcting the analytics data layer, means the store finder no longer depends on the time of year.
Emails that never arrived
A brand had problems across customer accounts and newsletter sign-ups, and store emails weren’t being delivered reliably. Setting up a proper SMTP integration addressed the delivery problem at its cause, rather than resending messages manually.
The common thread
Each of these could have been patched on the surface: a CSS tweak, a manual feed edit, a note to staff about daylight saving, a resent email. Finding the actual cause takes a little longer, but it’s the only fix that doesn’t come back.