Everything is in My licences, and that is fine until you are debugging a site at eleven at night and cannot remember what it was built from. A small record of your own is worth keeping.
What to write down
- The item name and the seller
- The purchase code
- The version you actually installed, which is not always the latest
- Where it is installed, if you run more than one site
- When author support ends
Where to keep it
Anywhere that is not only in your head and not only on the machine running the site. A note in your password manager works well, because the purchase code belongs with your other credentials rather than in a spreadsheet in a shared drive.
Keep the package too
Download it once and keep a copy. If a seller retires an item you keep the licence and the download, but having your own copy means never depending on that at the worst moment.
Note what you changed
The single most useful line in the whole record. "Edited templates/header.php to add the tracking code" saves an hour of confusion after an update, every time.
Review it once a year
Which items are still in use, which support periods lapsed, which have updates you never applied. Fifteen minutes annually keeps a portfolio of sites from quietly rotting.
