Best way to update Hikashop

Hello,

I'm not sure to understand fully your question.

Regarding the update and the settings ; please read the third point of our FAQ :
www.hikashop.com/support/faq.html

About the layouts ; if you're using view overrides (and language override, css overrides) and not modifying core files ; there is no chance that you will loose your modifications.
A minor update is going smoothly since it is a minor update and do not change the lot of things in HikaShop and its behavior.
But, if you performed a major updates ; like HikaShop 2.x > 3.X ; it would be sure that a lot of things would change since it has been a major release with a lot of modifications.

And in any case ; when you want to perform an update. You should always perform a backup and it's best to do a test update in a pre-production website first.
Thanks to that, you got a good environnement, have time to perform tests and be able to do the update on the production website afterwards.

Regards,