Appearance
Refreshing and rebuilding your store
Magento prepares a lot of work ahead of time — compiled code, theme files, search and price indexes, cached pages — so your storefront stays fast. When one of those prepared pieces falls out of step with your store, things look wrong: pages are stale, styling breaks, or prices and search results are out of date.
Your store's Maintenance tab has a Refresh / rebuild the store section with one button for each standard Magento maintenance action. Each button shows the exact Magento command it runs, so there's no mystery about what happens.
The five actions
Listed in the order you'd usually run them after a bigger change. For a small problem, start at the bottom — Flush cache fixes most things.
| Action | What it does | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Upgrade schema / data | Applies pending database and data updates from your modules (setup:upgrade). | After installing, updating or importing modules. |
| Compile code | Rebuilds Magento's generated code from scratch (setup:di:compile). Takes 1–3 minutes. | You see "class not found" or other errors that point at old code. |
| Deploy static content | Regenerates the CSS, JavaScript and theme files for every storefront language (setup:static-content:deploy). | Styling is broken, or images, icons or scripts are missing. |
| Reindex | Rebuilds the catalog and search indexes (indexer:reindex). | Prices are wrong, products are missing, or search results are stale. |
| Flush cache | Clears all Magento caches (cache:flush). The lightest refresh. | Almost any "my change isn't showing" problem — try this first. |
Upgrade schema / data and Compile code also restart your storefront when they finish, so the new code is actually used — you don't need a separate restart.
Reindex leaves out the Sales Assistant's own index: it keeps itself up to date, and rebuilding it would use your monthly embedding allowance.
Is it safe?
Yes. None of these actions changes your products, orders, customers or settings — they only rebuild Magento's prepared copies from your current store.
Your store stays online while they run. For a full rebuild (for example Upgrade schema / data followed by Compile code), you can turn on Maintenance mode first so shoppers see a maintenance page instead of a half-rebuilt store, then turn it off when you're done.
Good to know
- One at a time. Only one maintenance action runs on a store at once; the other buttons are unavailable until it finishes.
- The result is checked. After an action that changes code, your store must start up and answer normally, or the action is reported as failed. The section shows the last action run and whether it completed.
- Images aren't rebuilt. These actions don't touch your product images. Missing thumbnails are a separate image-resize task.
- Not covered by a button? Use Run a custom command for other Magento commands.
- Just need a quick reset? Restart web tier / clear cache clears caches and restarts the storefront in one step.