Maintain your store and keep growing it safely
Set up weekly and monthly routines for updates, backups and security, learn to add features on branches, read your reports, and reuse the whole series for another store.
You will have: A MAINTENANCE.md with weekly and monthly routines, automatic dependency update pull requests, a safe way to add features, and a short guide to reuse this series for a different store.
Before you start
- Episode 23 is done and your store is live
- GitHub repository settings open, so you can turn on security alerts and automatic update pull requests if the agent asks
- A recurring 30-minute slot in your calendar each week and one hour each month
- Your reports from Episode 17 working in the admin panel
Make it yours
Change the example (fashion store) to your own. Your answers are saved in this browser and used in every episode.
Other series keywords (2)
Your prompt
Paste into: Your AI agent (Claude Code or Codex) opened in your project folder.You are my site maintainer. My store "Thread & Needle" is live at threadandneedle.com. It is a fashion e-commerce store that sells women's and men's clothing, shoes and accessories to customers in United States in USD, built with Next.js, Neon Postgres, Cloudinary, Resend and Stripe, hosted on Vercel, with code in GitHub. I am not a programmer and I use macOS.
Plan first: show me your plan and wait for my OK before changing anything.
Goal: make the store easy and safe to look after, and to grow, without breaking it.
Tasks, on a new branch:
1. Write MAINTENANCE.md in plain language with three routines.
Weekly (30 minutes): check the uptime and error alerts, read the sales and order report from the admin panel, look for orders stuck unpaid or unshipped, check email bounces, and merge small dependency update pull requests only when tests pass.
Monthly (1 hour): take a production backup and rehearse a restore into a scratch database, review who has admin access, rotate any key that was shared or might have leaked, run a security check, review free-tier usage on Vercel, Neon, Cloudinary and Resend (verify limits on each pricing page), and re-read the policy pages.
After any big change: run the full test suite and a test purchase in test mode.
2. Add a command named "npm run health" that runs the checks the agent can do alone: lint, type check, unit tests, end-to-end tests, npm audit for known vulnerable packages, and a list of outdated packages. It must print a short summary in plain language with PASS or ATTENTION for each, and must not print secrets.
3. Add automatic dependency update pull requests (for example a Dependabot configuration for GitHub), grouped so I get few, small pull requests. Explain how to tell a safe update from a risky one (major updates need a test run and a look at the changelog). Never auto-merge.
4. Write FEATURE_WORKFLOW.md: the safe way to add anything new. Create a branch, ask the agent for a plan first, build in small commits, run npm run health, test on the Vercel preview link with test data, open a pull request, read the summary, merge only if checks pass, watch the site for 30 minutes, and roll back from Vercel if something breaks. Add three example features I could try next (discount codes, product reviews, wishlist), each with a one-line warning.
5. Add a short section "How to read your reports" explaining what to look at in the sales report, the traffic report and the error alerts, and what number changes should make me investigate.
6. Add REUSE_THIS_SERIES.md: how to build a different store with this series. Change the keywords at the top of the series, then create a new GitHub repository, Neon project, Cloudinary folder, Resend domain, Stripe account and fresh secrets. Never copy .env files, customer data or keys from this store. List which episodes can be skipped and which must be repeated.
7. Finish with a short wrap-up: what I now own, what it costs when free plans run out, and three risks to watch (payments, customer data, out-of-date packages).
Security rules: never print, log or commit a secret. Never auto-merge. Never run commands that delete data without asking me.
Verify yourself: run npm run health and show me the summary, and show that the Dependabot configuration file is valid.
Commit with a clear message such as "Add maintenance routines, health command and workflow guides" and open a pull request.
Report back in this format:
- What was done
- What I should check
- Anything that needs my decisionReview the prompt, then copy it. Never paste real passwords or API keys into a chat.
How to check it worked
- MAINTENANCE.md, FEATURE_WORKFLOW.md and REUSE_THIS_SERIES.md exist and are written in words you understand
- Running npm run health prints a short summary with PASS or ATTENTION lines and no secrets
- GitHub opens a first batch of small update pull requests (this can take a day), and none of them is merged automatically
- Your calendar has a weekly and a monthly maintenance slot
- You can explain in one sentence how to undo a bad release in Vercel
- You added one small feature on a branch, checked it on a preview link, and merged it with passing checks
Sample result
Example: fashion storeExample for the fashion store: the health summary and the maintenance calendar. Your results will differ.
If something goes wrong
- An update pull request fails the tests.
- Do not merge it. Ask the agent: "Read the failing test output, explain what changed in this package, and either fix the code on that branch or recommend we skip this update." Major updates may need a few small code changes.
- npm audit reports many problems and you are unsure which matter.
- Ask the agent to separate issues in packages used by the live site from issues in development tools, rank them by severity, and fix the live ones first with the smallest safe update.
- A new feature works on your computer but breaks the live site.
- Use Rollback in the Vercel Deployments list to promote the last good deployment, then ask the agent to reproduce the problem on a branch. If it touched the database, do not undo the migration blindly: restore only after the agent explains the plan and you confirm.
- You forget the routines after a few weeks.
- Put the weekly and monthly slots in your calendar. If your agent supports scheduled tasks, check its official docs for the current way to set one up, and keep the task read-only so it reports rather than changes.
Maintenance itself is free. Plan the day you may outgrow free plans: Vercel commercial use, Neon storage, Cloudinary bandwidth and Resend volume. Verify every limit on the provider's pricing page, since they change.
More in Go live
- Episode 20Create the online database and migrate it safely
- Episode 21Deploy your store to Vercel with your own domain
- Episode 22Add legal pages, search basics and trust signals
- Episode 23Run the go-live checklist and open for real orders
This is part of the series Build a secure, no-cost e-commerce website with AI agents. See all 24 episodes, the tools used and answers to common questions on the series page.