Go live checklist
Prior to entering your ticket to go live and switching the DNS, you should complete this checklist and all tests for your deployed site/store. Deploy your master branch to the Production environment.
Completely test in Production
See Test deployment for testing all aspects of your sites, stores, and environments. These tests include verifying Fastly, User Acceptence Tests (UAT), and performance testing.
Go Live Prep call with support
Contact Support to schedule a Go Live Preparation call. We walk through the Go Live process, verify your readiness with a checklist, and discuss the final steps.
Enter a ticket with domain names
You may need information for this ticket.
- Log in to your Magento Cloud account.
- Click Support > Submit ticket from the top menu.
- Follow the prompts to open an issue with Support. Support assists you with your live deployment and gives you an IP address for your live site so you can set up DNS.
- Provide a list of all storefront domain names for the shared SSL certificate.
- (Optional) If you purchased a Domain-Validated SSL (HTTP) certificate as part of your subscription, provide the certificate files in an attachment to the ticket. We will provide the certificate to Fastly for deployment.
DNS configurations
You need to complete configurations for your DNS including:
- Set all necessary redirects, especially if you are migrating from an existing site
- Set the zone’s root resource record to address the hostname
- Lower the value for the Time-to-Live (TTL) to refresh DNS information to correctly point customers faster to the Production store
We recommend a significantly lower TTL value when switching the DNS record. This value tells the DNS how long to cache the DNS record. When shortened, it refreshes the DNS faster. For example, changing this value from 3 days to 10 minutes. Be advised, this adds load to the web server.
After checking with your registrar about where to change your DNS settings, add a CNAME record for your website that points to the Fastly service: prod.magentocloud.map.fastly.net. If you use multiple host names for your site, you must add a CNAME record for each one.
This does not work for an apex domain (also referred to as a naked domain). You must use a DNS provider that supports forwarding DNS queries to use an apex domain.
The following list contains examples of DNS providers for informational purposes. Use your preferred DNS provider.
- CNAME with ALIAS record from Dyn
- ANAME record on DNS Made Easy
- ANAME at easyDNS
- ACNAME at CloudFlare
- ALIAS at PointDNS
Many other DNS providers also offer workarounds to accomplish this goal. The most common is to add a CNAME record for the www host on the domain and then use the DNS provider’s redirect service to redirect the apex over to the www version of the domain. Consult your DNS provider for more information.
Another option for apex domain is to add A records, which maps a domain name to the Fastly IP addresses:
151.101.1.124151.101.65.124151.101.129.124151.101.193.124
TLS and Fastly
If you use TLS with Fastly enabled in your environment, you must provide your DNS provider with a TXT record from Fastly. We provide a Domain Validated SSL certificate with Subject Alternative Name enabled, issued by GLobalSign. When entering your Support ticket for DNS information and going live, let us know you are using TLS, provide your domain names and request the TXT record. You can then send this record to your DNS provider. The domain validation process is executed by Fastly.
For details on this TXT record, see Fastly’s DNS TXT record validation.
Verify Production configurations
Make a final pass for any Production configurations in the store(s). If you need to make changes to configurations, you can modify in Production. If settings are read-only, you may need to SSH and CLI commands to modify, or make configuration changes in your local and deploy across.
The following are recommended changes and checks:
- Outgoing email has been tested
- Base URL and Base Admin URL are set correctly
-
Change the default Magento Admin password
See Configuring Admin Security for further information on Admin configurations.
- Optimize all images for the web
- Enable minification for JS, CSS, and HTTP
Verify Fastly caching
Test and verify Fastly caching is correctly working in Production. For detailed tests and checks, see Fastly testing.
- Make sure that pages are being correctly cached in the page cache and Fastly
- Make sure the Fastly Extension is up-to-date
- Make sure the Fastly VCL is up-to-date
Performance testing
We recommend that you review the Magento Performance Toolkit options as part of your pre-launch readiness process.
You can also test using the following 3rd party options:
- Siege: Traffic shaping and testing software to push your store to the limit. Hit your site with a configurable number of simiulated clients. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols.
- Jmeter: Excellent load testing to help gauge performance for spiked traffic, like for flash sales. Create custom tests to run against your site.
- New Relic (provided): Helps locate processes and areas of the site causing slow performance with tracked time spent per action like transmitting data, queries, Redis, and so on.
- Blackfire (provided): Helps track through the issues New Relic finds and helps you dig deeper into the issue for specifics. Blackfire profiles the environment and helps locate bottlenecks indepth: process, method call, query, load, and so on.
- WebPageTest and Pingdom: Real-time analysis of your site pages load time with different origin locations. Pingdom may cost a fee. WebPageTest is a free tool.