Why upgrades matter
Platform upgrades rarely make headlines, but skipping them leaves stores on unsupported versions with known security issues. Done badly, they cause downtime on a trading website. I’ve led several, and they all follow the same discipline.
Selected projects
- Starter to Pro migration: moving an Adobe Commerce Cloud store to the Pro architecture alongside a platform upgrade, with performance optimisation.
- A multi-version platform upgrade for a busy trading business, keeping the operation stable through the upgrade and supporting it afterwards.
- A complex upgrade combined with new features: a store locator with location-based stock pickup, multi-source inventory and order synchronisation, followed by launching a store for a second country.
The discipline
- Review before you estimate. Check every third-party module and customisation for compatibility, and replace what is no longer maintained instead of patching around it.
- Rehearse on staging with production-like data, more than once.
- Write the go-live plan down. A timed checklist with owners: maintenance window, backups, deployment, data steps, smoke tests and the point after which rolling back is no longer practical.
- Verify with evidence afterwards. Compare monitoring before and after on like-for-like periods, excluding the deployment days that would skew the results, and confirm whether remaining errors are new or were already there.
The lesson
A calm launch is the result of the work done before it. The checklist, the rehearsal and the honest post-release review matter more than any single command on the night.
