Ecommerce Templates > General Help > Checklist

Checklist - Before going live with your store

Once you have your store ready and think it's time to unleash it to the world, it may be a good idea to go through our checklist to make sure everything is as it should be.

General Issues

  • Make sure that each page of your site has unique TITLE and META DESCRIPTION tags more details more details
  • Check your site on a different computer, preferably in Chrome, Internet Explorer and Firefox. Pay particular attention to any broken links, screen resolution problems or slow loading pages.
  • Ask a friend or colleague to browse your store and make a purchase.
  • Make sure that you have carried out demo transactions for your payment provider and that emails are received as well as that orders show correctly in the order admin page of the control panel.
  • Be sure that all your graphics are optimized and contain ALT information.
  • Include a site map, linked from all your pages with text links to the most important pages on the store.
  • Include your main keywords in a natural way on your home page blurb.
  • Make sure your product descriptions are unique and not copied and pasted from your supplier.
  • Make sure you have changed the default password and user name for the control panel.
  • Ask for a site critique.

ASP Version

  • Make sure your database is not downloadable. You can test this yourself by typing in the address eg www.yourstore.com/fpdb/vsproducts.mdb. If you receive an option to download the .mdb file then it may mean that people can access your database. Please check with your host if you have any doubts at all. Most hosts will provide you with a directory below the root of your web with the correct permissions already set.

SECURITY TIP
The best place for your database is outside the web root. Most hosts provide a special folder for this with the database permissions already set. Using a folder outside the web root will make it difficult for anyone to download your database and gain access to your username and password. Otherwise you must set the permissions on your database folder so that your database cannot be downloaded.

SECURITY TIP
Change the name of the vsadmin folder
This is quite simple. Download the vsadmin folder, rename it and upload it to ther server again.
In the old vsadmin folder (the one that is still called vsadmin) open includes.asp and add these two lines:

disallowlogin=TRUE
notifyloginattempt=TRUE

When updating remember you will need to upload the updater files to both the new and old folders.

PHP Version

  • Be sure that each of the cart related pages at the very top in HTML view and before the opening HTML tag there is a little bit of code that goes like this . . .

    <?php
    session_cache_limiter('none');
    session_start();
    ob_start(); ?><html>

    This needs to be on each of the cart related PHP pages like cart.php, search.php, products.php, categories.php and so on.

  • Don't have spaces in your file names so use a pattern like my-page.php rather than my page.php - remember they are also case sensitive.
  • Make sure all your currency symbols are displaying correctly.

SECURITY TIP
Change the name of the vsadmin folder
This is quite simple. Download the vsadmin folder, rename it and upload it to ther server again.
In the old vsadmin folder (the one that is still called vsadmin) open includes.php and add these two lines:

$disallowlogin=TRUE;
$notifyloginattempt=TRUE;

When updating remember you will need to upload the updater files to both the new and old folders.