Shopify Maintenance & Support
Someone who owns
the store after launch.
Monitoring, fixes, app hygiene, performance and a monthly block of development time — for the stores that were excellent on launch day and have had nobody assigned to them since.
What this is
Shopify maintenance, plainly.
Shopify maintenance is ongoing ownership of a store that already launched: monitoring it, fixing it, keeping the theme and apps current, holding performance steady, tracking the platform deadlines Shopify publishes, and working through the backlog every month. It is the least glamorous service on this site and the one that most often turns out to have been the missing piece.
Monitoring
Knowing before your customers do.
- Uptime and checkout availability checks
- JavaScript error and failed-request monitoring
- Core Web Vitals tracked on real user data
- Integration and feed failure alerts
- Analytics sanity checks so reporting stays trustworthy
Theme & code
Stores drift. Someone has to pull them back.
- Bug fixes across templates and devices
- Theme version hygiene and merge management
- Removing dead code, unused sections and abandoned experiments
- Accessibility fixes as they are found
- Version control and a proper staging workflow
App stack hygiene
The most common cause of a store that got slow without anyone changing anything.
- Audit of what each app does and whether it still earns its place
- Removing leftover scripts from uninstalled apps
- Update management and post-update regression checks
- Resolving apps that conflict with each other
- App cost review against actual usage
Performance
Speed decays quietly. It is worth a standing allocation rather than an annual panic.
- LCP, INP and CLS held to a target rather than watched
- Image, font and script discipline
- Third-party tag audit and cleanup
- Template-level optimization on the pages that matter
- Before-and-after measurement, not assertions
Platform deadlines
Shopify deprecates capabilities on published dates. Missing one is avoidable and expensive.
- Tracking API version and checkout deprecations
- Legacy Scripts and their replacement with Functions
- Theme and app compatibility ahead of platform changes
- Advance notice with an assessment of what it means for you
- The work scheduled before the deadline, not after it
Development capacity
A standing block of hours so the backlog actually moves.
- Monthly allocation, triaged by impact with you
- New sections, landing pages and campaign builds
- Small features and merchandising changes
- Integration tweaks as the business changes
- A clear record of where the hours went
The honest version
Stores do not fail. They decay.
Almost nobody calls an agency because their store broke. They call because it has been getting slightly worse for eighteen months and someone finally looked at the numbers.
The usual state of an unmaintained store
- Scripts from apps that were uninstalled two years ago, still loading
- A theme several versions behind, with customizations nobody documented
- Analytics that stopped reporting a key event after a redesign
- Checkout logic still depending on deprecated capabilities
- Images uploaded at full resolution to a template that resizes them badly
- A mobile bug on one browser that nobody on the team uses
And what we will not
- Store-down and checkout-broken issues worked immediately in business hours
- Everything else triaged by impact into the monthly allocation
- A monthly record of what was done and what it changed
- We will not advertise a response time we cannot hold every week
- We will not bank unused hours indefinitely to inflate a retainer
- We will tell you when a smaller plan fits better
Month to month, always. A support retainer you cannot leave is one nobody has to earn.
How it runs
Audit, stabilize, then keep it moving.
We do not take over a store blind. The first month is spent finding out what we have actually inherited — and you get that assessment whether or not you continue.
Inherit & Audit
Theme, code quality, app stack, integrations, performance, analytics and any looming platform deadlines. The findings are yours regardless of what happens next.
Week 1–2Stabilize
The things that are actively costing money or about to break — dead scripts, broken tracking, deprecated logic, mobile failures — cleared before anything else starts.
Month 1Instrument
Monitoring, alerting and performance tracking put in place, so the next problem announces itself instead of being discovered in a quarterly review.
Month 1–2Run the Cycle
Monthly triage with you, allocation spent on the highest-impact work, updates and regression checks, and a written record of what changed.
MonthlyLook Ahead
Platform deadlines flagged early with an assessment of the impact, and roadmap capacity planned around the peaks your business actually has.
OngoingOur thinking, published
Maintenance, in more depth.
Most of what a support retainer does is described better by specific problems than by a service description.
FAQ
Support questions.
Uptime and error monitoring, theme and app updates, bug fixes, performance work, security and platform-deadline tracking, and a monthly allocation of development hours for the backlog. It is ongoing ownership of a store that already launched — the part most brands have nobody assigned to.
Because Shopify keeps moving. Apps update and break each other, themes drift from their upstream version, checkout and API capabilities get deprecated on published deadlines, and page speed decays as scripts accumulate. Stores rarely fail suddenly; they degrade for months while nobody is watching.
Yes. We start with an audit of the theme, app stack, integrations and performance so we know what we are taking on — and you get that assessment whether or not you continue. Inheriting a codebase blind helps nobody.
Store-down and checkout-broken issues are treated as urgent and worked immediately during business hours. Everything else is triaged into the monthly allocation by impact. We would rather state that plainly than advertise a response time we cannot hold every week.
Month to month. Support retainers are the easiest thing in this industry to quietly underdeliver on, so the only honest arrangement is one you can leave. Unused hours do not roll up indefinitely — and we tell you when a smaller plan would fit better.
What is the store
doing right now?
We’ll audit the theme, the app stack, the integrations, the performance and the analytics, and tell you what is quietly costing you money — whether or not you put us on a retainer.