Planned Maintenance

Planned Maintenance

What it is: Planned maintenance is the scheduled work performed on ecommerce systems, platforms, or infrastructure to ensure stability, performance, and security. It can include software updates, server patches, database cleanups, or system upgrades—done proactively to minimize the risk of unexpected downtime.

Why it matters for ecommerce merchants: Unplanned downtime costs sales. Planned maintenance helps avoid those fire drills by keeping systems healthy and predictable. When done right, it minimizes disruption, strengthens security, and ensures customers experience fast, reliable, and secure shopping every time they visit a site.

Challenges:

• Timing maintenance windows to minimize impact on customers across time zones
• Coordinating across teams and vendors so dependencies aren’t overlooked
• Communicating proactively to customers and stakeholders about potential downtime
• Testing after updates to confirm that fixes didn’t introduce new issues