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Before moving on towards the configuration settings and options needed to improve the Magento’s load time, let us talk about the commonly offered solutions to Magento being slow.

Many of the developers during the optimization face either hardware problem or a software problem. As obvious as it may sound, there are certain elements that needs further clarification before you jump to conclusions:

The Hardware Dilemma:  

A hardware problem is that you need to change your hardware or you need to migrate your site on any other server.

But on other side, it is true because running a powerful software like Magento, needs a high potential server. The potential depends on the number of customers your Magento webstore serves at a time, for that you will need something that is in between mid-tier and ludicrous speed OR maybe you would need a more capable software for that.

The Software problem:

Software issues emerge primarily because of bad coding or may be the errors have been injected through a blacklisted or a rogue extension that’s been added by you erroneously or deliberately. If this is the case of errors in the code than the main solution is that you need a developer to go deep in the code, find it and correct it.

Besides the errors, there could be another problem with your code and that is, maybe the code is not efficient in performance as it actually should be in the first place. If this is the problem then this might be the bottleneck in your site’s code. So, address this issue by all means.

Check Configurations For Speed Before Beginning:

Configurations are needed to check the speed of your webstore as you might not be using all the Magento’s built in features that are available to help you out in optimizing the load time.

Many of the Magento stores don’t use these built-in functionalities, later resulting in a slow webstore. Listing down Magento’s built-in features that you need to improve the load times and also will give you information on how to configure them efficiently.

Configuration of Magento Built-in Features For Speed:

At this point when you have to perform any change to the Magento, we must recommend you to make all the changes that you must do on a development site at first.

To make sure that your store functionalities are up-to-date as you expected them to be then perform testing. After testing if you are not satisfied by them then make changings on the production.

The functionalities are listed below in an order of the impacts that are made on your store’s speed.

Caches:

Caches are there to help you out in speeding up your site or your system. And in Magento, caches plays an important role in optimization. They work by keeping the blocks of the HTML codes and then using them on needed time, speeding up your webstore because servers don’t need to generate them again.

If you are using Magento Enterprise version than caching would be a piece of cake for you because it comes with full page cache. But what if you are not using this version. Don’t worry we have a solution for that as well!

You can use some add-on extensions for the Community version to do full page caching. If you use this version and you want to boost up your site then we recommend you to install one of them.

The main issue on some of the stores is that only some of the caches are active. There could be many of the reasons of caches to be disabled. Maybe the extension that you are using is broken when the caches were turned on or may be you are not 100% confident that nothing will get wrong once you turn on the caches.

If you are facing above cases then you should resolve them at once. And before deployment, make sure your website to test in a development environment. After that turn them on and finally utilize the speed benefits as you wanted them to be!

Configuration of Caches:

The below mentioned are the tips and tricks to configure the caches:

1. Go to System > Cache Management
2. Select All caches
3. Select Enable under the Actions dropdown
4. Hit Submit button and Voila!

Flat Tables:

Magento has two modes:  Database Products and Categories. Magento can use many number of tables to generate the information or it may use one Flat table.

Both of the modes are there for you to use. If your are using Flat table mode then you also have to do indexing that is triggered when you save a product. Using flat tables means that you are not affecting any other things but only the speed of the site for your customers. Make sure to test the flat tables on the development site before making the changings in productions as many of the extensions do not work well with these flat tables.

Configuration of Flat Tables:

The below mentioned are the tips and tricks to configure the flat tables in your database:

1. Go to System > Configuration
   
2. Select Catalog from left
3. Open the Front End
4. Change the option to Yes  of the Use Flat Catalog Category and Use Flat Catalog Product
5. Hit Save and don’t forget to Test

Asset Crushing:

Magento depends on quite a few CSS and Javascript files in order to run, further you can add extensions as well. On the web, you need a connection to your server for each file because every file downloaded comes with overhead. This gives us the idea of packing your assets into a large file instead of packing them into smaller ones.

And yes, Magento does have this option through that you can merge all the Javascript and CSS files that are being used on your site into other files automatically.

Configuration of Assets Crushing:

The below mentioned are the tips and tricks to configure the asset crushing:

1. Go to System > Configuration
2. Click on the Developer link
3. Open up the Javascript Settings and CSS Settings
4. Set the value of Merge Javascript Files and Merge CSS Files to yes
5. Hit Save!
6. The merging of Javascript files also break functionalities, also it depends on the customizations your theme have. Also, make sure that you test.

Database Log Cleaning:

The log in Magento systems contains log that have quite a bit of data about each preview that is on the site. Many times this data is accumulated in the database. This  data can grow to a specific point where each additional log to the database takes the time that it needs to complete.

If your log cleaning is not enabled then your site might get slow after a couple of months but again it depends on the number of people visiting your site or more shortly the site traffic. By log cleaning, you are basically deleting the old entries and  keeping only the newer ones. You might think about data loss. Not to worry Magento’s database logs are not used for much.

Cleaning Database Logs:

The below mentioned are the tips and tricks to configure the database log cleaning:

1. Go to System > Configuration
2. Click on the link on the left bottom named System
3. Open up the Log panel
4. Set the following settings
   1. Set Enable Log to Yes
   2. Set Save Log, Days to 7
   3. Set Enable Log Cleaning to Yes
   4. Set Start Time to 0:00:00
   5. Set Frequency to Daily
   6. Enter your email address at Error Email Recipient
5. Hit Save and don’t forget to Test.

The Alternative Is Here! Disable Database Logs:

Yes, we have here a golden option too. This alternative is here to remove the additional functionalities of your website, let’s suppose you don’t need the functionalities of Recently Viewed Product or Compare Products for not logged in customers then simply just disable these logs. In result, you will get a Webstore which is much faster than before and yes your logs will be clean. To do this, the steps are mentioned below:

1. Go to System > Configuration
2. Click on the link on the left bottom named System
3. Open up the Log panel
4. Set Enable Log to No
5. Hit Save and don’t forget to Test.

Disable the Error/Debug Message Logging:

This is the last option in the list and can be done only if you have resolved all the errors on the site. Still, it can be useful to catch rare errors that are not discovered yet by keeping the logging enabled.

But if you disable the logging, it will have a measurable impact on your site speed and performance. Your question might be raised that when to disable this option, we will recommend you to disable it if your site is performing well without much errors.

Disabling Frontend logging

The below mentioned are the tips and tricks to disable the frontend logging:

1. Go to System > Configuration
2. Click on the link on the left bottom named Developer
3. Open up the Log Settings panel
4. Set Enabled to No
5. Hit Save and again don’t forget to Test.

Compilation:

The Compilation is a feature in Magento that is – right now – included for legacy support. You might hear this option before but actually, according to us, this is an anti-suggestion. This feature was introduced at the time when there was a hard time for PHP running codebases as large as Magento’s. Now, this issue has been fixed in new versions of php 5.0, so, you don’t need compilation feature as long as your server host provides you the functionality of OPcache.

Voila! You are Done Now!

The above-mentioned options are for your slow Magento Webstore and you want it to run it in faster speed.

Still, you are facing any issue? How much your Magento Website is now after doing few switches? Let us know in the comments.

WordPress.com is the commercial site that was co-created by Mutt Mullenweg and his company called Automatic. He made this platform open source and that means you can use it for free but yes it do have some limitations.

So the question is if the limitations are there then why would I have to use this free platform??  The answer is, upgrade your site and VOILA!! You can achieve your specific needs by upgrading your site and it will get looked after with top of the line spam-fighting power and automatic security updates.

To use it, all you have to do download it and place it in the public folder of your host, Signup and choose your blog name, then just design your site as you required.

Don’t worry for the installation as it will be managed right on the spot.

What is WordPress.org?

Using WordPress means your website is in your hands completely. (Yes really!!) The only limitation might here would be the resources that your hosting package provides you. WordPress.org is the platform where you can grab your own CMS copy for free, isn’t it good?

This software owns the responsibility of finding the hosting company to house the WordPress site with your own domain name that will help your visitors to point to it.

It provides you the facility to get involve in the community forum where you can ask any (relevant) question if you get stuck anywhere and also you can use the extensive documentations as well. If you like to get involved and join many other volunteers who contribute to the WordPress core code, mobile apps and translations than this site is good for you to use.

Comparison between WordPress.com & WordPress.org:

To give you the best remedy against your problem, which one’s right for you? Let us compare these two platforms by considering three of things: cost, freedoms and the limitations, and maintenance and development.

Cost:

At this time when we are going to compare cost of WordPress.com and WordPress.org, we have to look at four aspect associated with both of them. They include:  domain name, hosting, storage medium and ad removal.

If you want a fully featured website with your own domain name then go on with WordPress.org but if you can compromise on domain name and want a free platform then go for WordPress.com.

If cost is the most considerable part of your business plan then download WordPress from WordPress.org is the best option for you. Let’s get in more depth to better understand your choices.

WordPress.com:

No matter what, the hosting of your site on WordPress.com is free, but there are some         limitations. But there is also some good news, they can be removed with upgrades or plans that can be applied to each of your sites.

I have mentioned all the upgrades that you can choose from to have more control over your site on WordPress.com:

*Note that all of them but last two are annual subscriptions:

• $13 for Site redirect
• $120 for Unlimited premium themes
• $5 for Domain registration
• $13 for Domain mapping
• $8 per Domain for Domain Privacy
• $60 for Video Press
• $30 for Custom design
• $20 – $290 for Space upgrade
• $30 for No ads
• Starting from $20 for Premium theme, one-off fee
• $129 for Guided transfer, one-off fee

After getting know all the upgrades, it’s important for you to know for a newly registered domain you are working on, you also need the mapping upgrade. After setting up your website if you think that you need several upgrades, than you might be able to save some money if you upgrade to one of the WordPress.com plans, instead.

The above displayed picture is the current hosting plans at WordPress.com. You can select any of the upgrade package according to your need. But still if you want a site with full fledge features and with your own domain name, unlimited storage for the videos and the images, with no advertising, then WordPress.com can be quite expensive for you to use.

WordPress.org:

If you are working with this platform you can download the copy of free software. But keep in mind that hosting your own WordPress site is not free, so what to do now?

You can easily choose any hosting company. There are thousands of out there who can provide you what you want.  All you have to do is to check out which plan suits best for your need.

You can pay for the hosting as low as around $5 per month if you are using shared hosting packages, depends on your company as many of them offer regular promos.

But if you want hosting that is shared by much fewer people you can go for VPS (Virtual Private Server) and dedicated server packages, obviously you have to pay more if you choose this option.

And yes about domain names, if you want to use generic top level domain name such as .com, .org or .net then the costing will be around $10. There are some more gTLDs which are .rocks, .company, .ceo and many more which are also available from last year and are starting from $10 over $100.

At result of choosing WordPress.org you will have your full control over your site, it doesn’t matter which hosting company you choose.

Freedoms & Limitations:

The site you are building, truly depends on the choice you make while choosing hosting for your site. The freedom and wiggling room from a custom design to tweaking your site’s files or database all depends on your goals and your choices.

WordPress.com

If you are hosting your site with WordPress.com, then there would be limitations too for the folks who are running their businesses on WordPress.com. WordPress.com provides the environment that is ready to use with the maintenance of the software so that you can experience the things with in the secured environment, but in return you have to pay if you are doing any upgrades.

The limitations that are included are:

• Limited to WordPress.com themes and plugins – you can’t upload your own
• Limited storage space with limited control of your content
• You must pay to remove ads
• No FTP access to your files
• No use of third party tools such as Google AdSense

WordPress.org

The only limitation using WordPress.org is the amount of the storage you have and the hosting features provided by the hosting company, you have your own server and which means you have the freedom whatever you want to do.

About the themes and plugins you can use any of them free or paid and without ads, and if you wish to add your own just use Google Adsense.

1. Can use Google Adsense
2. Add edit or delete files and databases
3. FTP,shell and cPanel access to the files

You can use this platform without any limitations but it depends on your sense responsibility of maintaining it, unlike WordPress.com.

Development and Maintenance:

If you choose WordPress.com than you don’t have to worry about the maintenance but if you are using WordPress.org, it is truly your responsibility then, for that there are many hosting solutions available to help you out.

When it comes to the developing, no matter what you use, you don’t have to worry about anything (Thank God!).

The WordPress team works hard to provide the regular updates on the WordPress core code in order to make sure that your site have a solid foundation.

Don’t know anything technical or don’t have time to commit to ongoing maintenance and development??  Then WordPress.com is the best option for you. The more explanations are mentioned below.

WordPress.com:

The WordPress team and community will take care of all the maintenance and development work for you, in short you don’t have to do anything regarding maintenance and development whenever you upgrade or due to problem with your host your site suddenly going down.

You don’t have to keep yourself up-to-date with the WordPress news. And you don’t have to upgrade your site every time a new version of software is released.

WordPress.org:

If you are hosting your own WordPress site that doesn’t mean that you will not face difficulties, in fact you are fully responsible for your own site performance and development.

The responsibilities on you are:

1. Install and then set up your WordPress site
2. Configure your server for VPS and dedicated hosting
3. Regularly update your themes and plugins and WordPress version when new versions roll out
4. Keep your site secure for your visitors and protecting your site against hackers and spam
5. Back up your whole site regularly in case it breaks
6. Resolve problems with your site and server if they happens

If you love WordPress.org because of the flexibility this platform provide but you feel confuse as how to keep your site maintained, then worry not WordPress is a platform that provides you the solution of every problem including this.  Use a WordPress hosting solution which includes Pagely or WP Engine.

Just use this tool and it will look after all the backend maintenance for you, but, you have to pay more in order to sit back and watch the show (Maintenance).

Which one to choose?

At this point you may be have made your decision… Still no?

Let me tell you both are great options for you to choose but select the one by keeping in mind your plans about your sites, what are the skills level that you have and lastly how much time can you give to your site maintenance and designing.

If you are creating a simple blog website, and you don’t want to fuss with the security and the regular maintenance and the customization is not too much, then I would suggest to go for WordPress.com.

But if you are on the other side of the picture, and want a fuller control over the site, the design, the plugins that you are using , the files of the software and database with freedom to do so, and if there is no issue of security and maintenance of your site than WordPress.org will be your best bet.

Also if you are planning to develop an ecommerce site, social media or large business site that the self-hosted, WordPress site can be cheaper for you and offers more flexibility.

If you are planning to grow your site and to increase traffic, then download WordPress.org from WordPress is the best option and also our recommendation for you.

Want to share your experience with WordPress.com and WordPress.org? Let me know in the comments below.

Interface designs refer to the visual design or the site looks & feels. The interface is usually an iterative process. Don’t assume that if you have a pre-made template, you won’t require any images or layouts re-done. In fact, it means that the website development agency or a developer would show you several options and then modify them according to your requirements on an approved design.

Don’t skimp on the interface designs, if you do so then you’ll regret because today’s sophisticated visitors won’t ever give your website a second glance if they don’t feel attractive towards it or satisfied by the looks initially.

4: Responsiveness, Creation and Insertion Costs

The best designs are responsive means it should be mobile-friendly or in a simple way designed in a way to automatically adjust their layout and function easily on multiple devices like laptops, desktops, tablets and on smartphones. Creating a website design can cost around 20 to 30% of your entire website budget.

When it comes to creating the content, the design firm either create all the content on their end then insert it through CMS or deliver a blank design template that the client would populate it as desired.

5: Expect For the Additional Costing

It would be great if the end result of your planning matched with your desired budget perfectly. But it’s even smarter to plan for some unforeseen expenses. Whether it’s time for some last minute touch-ups or paying for additional functionalities.

Planning would provide you some wiggle room and minimize the potential for the setbacks and if you have some money left over, you could utilize it in enhancing any feature on your website.

6: Don’t Forget the Maintenance & Updating Cost

Websites don’t just get maintained by themselves. Besides all the initial investments, a considerable amount of money is required for the site maintenance.

Imagine if you delete an entire page of your website by mistake and loose hours of sales while trying to recover it, you will wish you would have spent some extra money on a maintenance contract.

The best website upgrades its strategy with the current trends and updates itself from time to time. If the website is using an e-commerce transaction platform or an email service to publish newsletters, you will be typically charged on monthly basis.

Maintenance costs vary depending upon your expectations from the firm or the developer.

Some Other Important Factors to Consider In Your Website Budget:

• Do you need a blog or a CMS (Content Management System)?
• Do you want automatic resizing?
• Do you need other features like social media channels, SEO?
• Do you need multimedia elements on the site?

Additional Things to Consider in your Budget:

• Additional designs like icons, graphics, animations, videos
• Additional Content Development
• Server set-up & administration including backup and 24/7 monitoring
• Additional applications and tools

Bonus Tip: The budget should be based on the strategic needs of your business. If you are tight on the budget, then you may want to consider drag & drop website builder to get started. Don’t forget new sites often costs more than the redesigns.

Magento is an open source ecommerce platforms, there are some things that Magento developers need to learn before they start utilizing the tools provided by Magento. Some of these tools are new, with enhanced development methods and technologies that developers would choose to utilize in their websites.

This article is all about the Magento 2 technology stack requirements. Because some new features are introduced in the new version of the popular e-commerce platform. Some of the most important Magento 2 technology stack requirements are mentioned below:

Magento 2 Technology Stack Requirements

• PHP (Programming Language)
• Zend Framework (Provided by Zend Engine)
• PSR-0, PSR-1, PSR-2, PSR-3, and PSR-4 (Coding Standards)
• Composer
• HTML5
• CSS3 (LESS pre-processor)
• JQuery
• RequireJS
• Symfony
• Apache
• Nginx
• MySQL
• Gulp
• Twig

Architecture layers diagram:

The below diagram shows the components of Magento technology, like the layers and tiers of all components, the 3rd party libraries and the supported databases.

1. PHP

Magento 2 technology stack requires PHP 5.5 and 5.6 as by default.

But as the new technology arrives it now supports PHP 7 as well. The new version of PHP makes the Magento technology much faster and significantly simplifies a coding routine.

2. Zend Framework

Magento 2 platform uses different frameworks which include Zend Framework 1, Zend Framework 2, Symfony, etc.

But it doesn’t completely rely on ZF as it has its own adapters and interfaces. These interfaces and adapters tunnels call to ZF 1 components. It would be highly beneficial for Magento developers to use the APIs that are provided by official Magento Framework so that they can avoid problems that are directly related to the platform’s internal changes.

3. PSR

PSR-0,1,2,3 and 4 are some coding standards. Magento 2 technology stack includes these coding standards too.

PSR-1 is the most basic coding standard, but it is marked as deprecated therefore PSR-4 is the new replacement. While PSR-0 is the default autoloading standard, and PSR-3 allows the Magento developer to write any code that is independent of any logging implementation.

• PSR-0 – Autoloader Standard
• PSR-1 – Basic Coding Standard
• PSR-2 – Coding Style Guide
• PSR-3 – Logger Interface
• PSR-4- Autoloader Standard

4. Composer

The composer is the Key Magento 2 technology stack requirement, and it supports whole Magento. The main benefit that Magento developers can get using Composer, is that it introduces a dependency management package for PHP.

The Advantages that Composers give are:

A. Your Project will only depend on some libraries.

B. Some of these libraries depend on other ones.

C. You declare the things you depend on.

D. The primary job of the composer is to find out which versions of a particular package that needs     to be installed, and then installs them by downloading them into your project.

5. HTML5

The structures and presentation of front-end components are handled by HTML5 which is a markup language. Being Magento 2 technology stack requirement, HTML5 simplifies the development and introduces new abilities.

6. CSS3

Magento 2 uses LESS and CSS instead of using Bootstrap in the theme core. The LESS preprocessor and LESS PHP adapter enable the use of LESS in the Magento 2 platform.

To read more about Magento UI library, read this post. And this post discuss why Magento uses LESS instead of SASS.

7. JQuery

JQuery is incorporated in Magento 2 by default, and is very fast in speed and lightweight, making it speedier and feature-rich which helps Magento 2 platforms to become more functional.

8. RequireJS

Another important component of Magento 2 technology stack requirements is RequireJS. This file and module loader is optimized for in-browser use to improve the speed and quality of code.

9. Symfony

Symfony- a PHP framework and the most important component of Magento 2 technology stack, used to make best Magento sites.

Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components that helps to speed up the e-commerce website platforms because it avoids repetitive coding tasks. One of the serialization standards that is introduced among Symfony components is YAML.

YAML is the best format for your configuration files because it makes them readable as INI files and as important as XML files. For further visit the github site and devdoc site.

10. Apache

The most important and essential Magento 2 technology stack requirement is Apache 2.2.x or 2.4.x. According to Netcraft, about 60% of all the worlds’ websites, are using Apache server.

If you want more information about Apache in Magento 2 check out dev docs site.

11. Nginx

Nginx– is another Magento 2 technology stack requirement.

Nginx is a reverse proxy server for protocols such as HTTPS, HTTP,  POP3, SMTP, and IMAP. It does not only provides your Magento platform speed but also provides low usage of memory by balancing the load, providing an HTTP cache and an origin of web server.

12. MySQL

MySQL is an open source database, and many websites rely on MySQL, but now Magento 2 also uses it to make best Magento websites.

Magento supports MySQL database reindexing but does not support MySQL statement-based replication. MySQL provides an advantage to many Magento developers by saving their money, time and power up your high-volume Magento 2 project.

13. Gulp

Some experienced developers recommend using Gulp instead of Grunt which is a contemporary JavaScript task runner used in Magento 2. Gulp provides Magento technology much faster building processes with streamlines deployment. Developers developed Gulp with an idea to connect community-developed micro-tasks, but Grunt only relies on a set of commonly used tasks.

14. Twig

Last but not least, another important Magento 2 technology stack requirement is Twig, which provides the Magento websites fast, flexible and secure PHP template engine. It simplifies your work with themes and templates. It does not provide any .twig template files. Therefore, it uses additionally .phtml files. Check out GitHub official site to find the Twig template engine for Magento 2 technology platform.

Conclusion

The Magento 2 technology stack is impressive as we can see. Don’t wait more to utilize all these Magento 2 features in your further ecommerce projects. The native support of Redis, Varnish, and Solr compared to 1.x, are the new opportunities. You can see the official Dev docs to see all the Magento technology stack requirements.

Did we miss something? Do you have some other features that you think is the best one for you? Do you have any questions related  to the technologies we just discussed? Mention them in the comments section below.

Similarly,  storytelling on the website is also important because it is effective in showcasing your brand or the company’s image to make people remember it; and also it gives the visitor on the website some visual cues to remember about you. Ideally, storytelling should be at the heart of your overall web development phase.

Stories Evoke Emotions

Considering this, the story told on your website should be interesting enough to evoke a positive emotion about the products or services offered in your visitor’s mind.

Now, for a fact, we encounter different stories in our everyday life. A group of protestors march by or some people doing a rally for their rights. See, every single person, animal or an object has its own story to tell. The stories are not that complicated as they seem.

The key part of a successful website is to build a communication bridge between the company and its potential prospects which can be done through the storytelling. The story should be the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of your organization.

• What are you doing?
• Why are you doing it?

In the terms of Digital Marketing, “If the content is the King then the Queen rules the visuals.”

Like in the game of chess, the king can move one space at a time whereas the queen can make some real power moves. This tells that losing the king means losing the game but without your leading lady, there are no powerful moves to make and you will be handicapped.

The client always expects of something bigger than just a “website” or a “brand”. They expect an appealing story from you.

We are sharing down here some important story-telling tips which will help in representing you and your organization in the best way:

Words or Images?

Having the information written verbally on your website is simply not enough, so, display it in a manner that people can enjoy and understand it.

When a story generates, it doesn’t only move people emotionally but they retell it many times over, ultimately, clarifies the message conveyed in it.

Visuals are highly important for a website. One can use pictures to tell stories all the time.

Images and videos hold more power over the audience than words. Well-told visual stories can really move, mold, or melt the reader’s, heart. Compelling visual stories will develop strong engagement by evoking emotions, instilling connections with the viewer.

Typography is a much more expressive medium because just like images, words also tells a different story depending on the way they are written.

Animate the Content!

The stories and the art of storytelling plays a major role in content marketing today

Sharing the mission and vision of your company in the manner of storytelling will more likely to be remembered. Create appealing content to help in achieving the business goals. Your audience will prefer to purchase a product/service you are offering if you associate a story with the content of your website.

Make Sure To Focus On The Authenticity Of Your Story

Ensure the clarity and the consistency in your content throughout the website by using a central story.

Use props, visuals, and videos to ignite the feeling towards your cause or business in the reader’s heart. Write blogs on tips, benefits, and history of your business while telling examples that people can relate to.

Communicate With Visuals

Storytelling on a website isn’t really a marketing tactic, instead, it is their history which they share with the world.

Don’t let your users know verbally as why your brand or company’s product is necessary, applicable and effective, in fact, use the chance of visual storytelling to let them know.

Display and video are the two primary purpose for the fastest growing digital marketing. So, the way your brand is seen, will be the most critical to the decision process and buying cycle.

Storytelling can be beneficial to any profit or non-profit organization.

Test different content types, analyze their results and evolve with the rapid change in the interests of your customers.

Show. Don’t Tell!

The Conclusion

Remember, people don’t necessarily first look for the skills, they look for your ideas, your vision, and your dream as to how far they can take themselves with your company, organization or brand. So, create a story about your brand on your website that compels your potential prospects into believing that you can take them to the height of success and assist them in accomplishing their personal goals through you.

Bonus tip: The more specific, clear and concise the stories are transmitted, the more likeable and memorable your business will be.

If you are a web developer or a website owner, and you love to use CMS that are PHP-enabled like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or Magento, you should rejoice to hear that according to official PHP timetable, PHP 7 which was released on 3 December 2015, is now ready for the production use.

Yes you heard it right! PHP 7 is out to use. We are going to tell all the great things you need to know about PHP 7.

As soon as the PHP 7 was released, many developers and programmers started downloading the beta version and start playing around it but found it full of bugs.

They reported it and that is how the PHP 7 went behind the curtains until it become fully bug-proof.

PHP 7 is a platform that can deliver powerful app, all from cloud to enterprise applications and from mobile to the web Applications. Almost everything comes under the umbrella of PHP 7. This version has the most powerful impact as it decreases the memory consumption with extreme improvements in performance.

Let’s take a look at what PHP 7 entails:

1. Don’t Get Confuse in 6 or 7

The version PHP 5.6 renamed to PHP 7. As PHP 6 already existed, developers tend to do some experimental project but this version of PHP never reached to the production phase. After some dispute, the PHP official development team came to a conclusion and they decided that they will name this new version to PHP 7 and will omit PHP 6 name completely.

The decision helped the users to stay away from mixing up the previously attempted experiment with the latest development.

2.  PHPNG, the New Core

After the release of PHP 4 in 1999, the platform was powered by the Zend engine till now.

Zend, the Zend Framework, which supports PHP 7, is an open source execution engine and is written in C language. It is used to interpret the PHP language. The PHP 5.X uses the Zend Engine II that was used to enhance the functionality of the previous engine.

Whereas the PHP 7 uses the Zend Engine with a code name of PHPNG (Next Generation).

3. Double the Speed

There are many improvements which can be seen when it comes to new PHPNG Engine, but the most significant feature is the improvement in the performance. The PHPNG is the new structure of the Zend Engine thus, we can see optimized memory usage.

By using PHP7, you will need fewer servers to serve the same amount of users with the increased time of execution of code. The below graph is the performance benchmarks that Zend Performance Team provides.

4. Power of Error Handling

Handling the catchable fatal errors is not an easy task for PHP coders and never have been. The only solution to handle these fatal errors is to use Exceptions.This new Zend Engine provides the facility for the PHP developers to handle the errors easily without the system failure at the run time which is quite unprofessional.

The new EngineException objects in new Zend Engine don’t extend the Exception Base Class of previous versions. This object shows that the new system is using the interfaces and data from earlier versions but producing the different kinds of exceptions in error handling: the Traditional and the Engine Exceptions.

PHP 7 enables PHP programmers to catch both types of exceptions by introducing the new Parent Class Called BaseException.

The code and the result emerged because of the fatal errors due to the previous versions is shown below:

The new changings are:

5. 64-Bit Windows Systems Support

Native environment of PHP is Linux because the PHP is a prominent member of the LAMP stack. But it is not impossible to run PHP to run on Windows system. There are two types of bit systems of Windows X86 and X64. The PHP 5.X don’t provide the support to X64 bit version of Windows. So PHP 7 introduced the support to X64 bit Windows system.

PHP 7 now allows you to run the language on your 64-bit Windows system. Both 64-bit integers and large files are supported by PHP 7.

6. New Spaceship (<=>) and Null Coalescing (??)  Operators

The official name for Spaceship operator is Combined Comparison Operator. The notation of this operator is like a simplified spaceship like this <=>.

This operator gives result 0 if both left-hand operand and right-hand operand are equal, returns 1 if the left operand is greater than right operand and -1 if the left operand is greater than the right operand. This three-way comparison operator not only exist in PHP but also in other programming languages like Perl and Ruby.

The Null Coalescing – denoted as (??), used to check if the value exists or not, if the value does not exist then it returns a default value and if the value does exist it will return the left operand, and right operand returned if the value doesn’t exist or may be any other case.

The below code snippet shows how this new operator reduces the time spent on basic declarations:

7.  Enables Accurate Type Declarations

The new PHP 7 allows developers and programmers that they can intensify the quality of their code by using the correct return type declarations so that the unintended return values can prevented.

The image shows a simple use case foo() function. This feature is supposed to return an array. There are more complicated examples which show the return type declarations.

PHP 7 have introduced four new types of declarations for scalar values to increase the features even more. The types are – int, float, string and bool. These new scalar types allow the PHP developers to denote the integers, floats, strings or booleans to get returned.

8. Add Anonymous Classes

PHP 7 enables the developers to use OOP concept and to use anonymous classes. The concept already exists and used in many Object-oriented languages like C# and Java. The anonymous class – as defined by the name- are the classes with no names. But the object that instantiates has same functionality as an object of a named class.

If we talk about the syntax which is same as what we were using in traditional PHP classes the only difference is the name, which is missing. The advantage of using anonymous class is that it can increase the speed of code and execution time as well, if and only if these classes used in an excellent way. And in the case when a class doesn’t need to be documented.

9. Imports from the Same Namespace

The Group Use Declarations– is indeed a bless feature for the developers who want to import many classes from the same namespace when required. This new syntax helped the developers by cutting the babbling of words, makes the code neat and clean and easier and save the typing time.

Using Group Use Declarations makes it easy and clean for you to read through and debug codes as it helps the developers to identify the imports of the same namespace in a module.

Conclusion

PHP 7 has been introduced with a goal to free up space which leads to improvement. It was crucial to get rid of many deprecated functionalities , old and unsupported Server APIs and extensions to increase the speed and free up space.

This clean up provides more security by removing items that have deprecated for a while in PHP 5 and not in use for a long time. PHP 7 can break the code if your app is running on older version of PHP.

This article helps you to get to the conclusion that how advance the PHP 7 is. And in next versions, you will see more enhancements and new improvements which would be more exciting for the developers and programmers who love to play with PHP code. You might then come across some bugs but wait! That’s how the system tested and that’s how you will learn more and more and can become PHP champ!

Like! Share! Subscribe! And tell us in the comment section below any cool feature that you love about PHP 7.

Website testing is a necessary step to take. Cross-browser test­ing, check­ing for dead links, proof-reading these are the things that should get tested before making the site live. This article is all about the steps that are required specifically for starting a Drupal site. Some of the recommendations of Drupal Pre-launch Checklist for developers are:

Server Con­fig­u­ra­tion

Con­fig­ure Cron:

Drupal do have extendable number of Cron jobs that are scheduled to run at different intervals, some of them are to re-index the search mechanism and some are to check for updates. You can make custom modules in Drupal just like other CMS with their defined Cron jobs.

These Cron jobs can vary from searching the lat­est Twit­ter feeds to pro­cess­ing mes­sage queues. Without doing Cron jobs, you can run your site, but I would highly recommend that this will let your site to maintain the security by Update status module.

If you can go through the official documentation you can see the whole process of the setting up Cron job, or else do have a look at Poor Man’s Cron. It is a functionality offered in Drupal 7 which is a simple back port of automatic Cron-running functionality.

Check The Upload Sizes & Execution Time:

If you want to allow users to upload large files such as MP3 and MP4 files on your site, then make sure to configure the server first. Allow your server to upload up to an approximate size.

And not just uploading, take a look at the max_execution_time setting also. This time setting will get increase if you are uploading large files.

Check Recipient Email Addresses:

Before launching the Drupal site first make sure to double check that either all the forms, modules, and other things are sending to the correct email addresses or not. Most of the developers forget to update these, once the site is ready, change your own addresses to the client’s one.

Secu­rity

Set The File Permissions:

The security is the first concern of any website, so before launching your Drupal site make sure that you correctly configure the security permissions on your file systems. This would help in securing your site from any malicious hackers. Make sure that all files are saved in their particular folders, and also ensure that settings.php file which contains all the information of database connections, is also secured.

Make sure that to facilitate for uploading functionality, your files directory needs to be writeable by the web server. We would recommend you to ensure that your installation must be configured with access to a writable temporary directory. To check the whole process of how to give files permissions and ownership and how to install the files directory, check these two official documentation.

Pro­tect Your Root Account:

Typically during drupal development, you have to develop your site using an admin account. Make sure to secure that account. This account has all the information and the access to your website. And not just the access, but the havoc which could be wrecked by a hacker get­ting access to this account which the network security is not permitting, and to be carried out using a web browser.

While building the admin account, choose a secure admin account username instead of just choosing admin, make something difficult to guess. And also make sure that the password must be secure enough. You can use a Drupal module named  AES so that you can tighten up the security more.

Check Per­mis­sions:

Some of the new modules introduce new kind of permissions that are restrictive. These type of agreements have to be manually enabled for many other roles. These include anonymous, registered or custom. One of the main advantages is that only the root user can access the part of the site but not a regular user, hence more security. Before launching, it is highly recommended that you should test the site with each role.

Turn Off Error Reporting:

Ever witnessed any error messages of Drupal live sites? I have seen them often. These errors are not only Drupal-specific messages. Drupal renders many PHP errors.  You have options to either display them or not.

To configure them, go to Site Configuration -> Error Reporting. Now set the option of the same name to write errors to the log. Doing so will not display errors.

Error Han­dling

Han­dle 404 Errors Gracefully:

Before launching make sure that the 404 errors (or missing pages) are catered in as helpfully as possible. There is a built-in feature of Drupal in which Error handling page is displayed on pages where there is no block configured. For that, you can use Drupal module named Search 404 or you can use 404 block. This module guesses what the user wants or what user tries to search. It helps the user by feeding terms from URL into the search engine.

Search Engine Optimization

Check Robots.txt:

Don’t forget to check robots.txt before launching. And even before that, ensure that the rel­e­vant sec­tions of your new site are excluded from crawlers. To further understand, see the documentation on Drupal official site.

Com­bine Pathauto With Global Redirect:

First install a module called Global Redi­rect with an existing module  Pathauto mod­ule. You should use these modules on your Drupal site to generate “friendly” URLs auto­mat­i­cally. It works by performing a 301 redirect to aliased path or by analyzing a vis­ited link.

You must be thinking, why is this impor­tant? The answer is real simple,  if a sin­gle page is acces­si­ble from mul­ti­ple URL’s, for instance, contact-us is an alias for node/123, some other user vis­its node/123 directly what Drupal will do is that it will redi­rect back to contact-me page on your site. By doing so, it can impact neg­a­tively on your search ranking.

Main­te­nance

Cre­ate A Main­te­nance Page:

Make a custom maintenance page for the users who would visit your site during the time when you are upgrading or maintaining your site. Make it more user-friendly and professional. It’s pretty easy to create a cus­tom main­te­nance page from Dru­pal 6 onwards. Check out official documentation for further information on theming Drupal 6 maintenance page.

Per­for­mance

Con­fig­ure Caching:

Caching is the most important part. Before you launch, check your site’s caches are fully configured or not. By doing so, Caching will deliver sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance boosts, par­tic­u­larly on high-traffic sites. Make sure to check if views module has done any pages or blocks or not, because they have to cache switched-off by default. Make sure to configure them as well.

Con­fig­ure Css And Javascript Optimisation:

You can compress the CSS and JavaScript files by switching on on the end of the development process which is usually turned off during the entire process. Having CSS and JavaScript files more means increas­ing the num­ber of HTTP calls for every page sig­nif­i­cantly. You can “squeeze” all the CSS and JavaScript files. To-do-so, compress­ them at the same time.

Con­tent and Publishing

Check Unpub­lished Con­tent Is Not Visible:

Normally a developer forgets to check the sta­tus of a node before dis­play­ing any custom code for creating a view. That is why draft work could appear after you launched the site. So make sure to check that by checking the fil­ters on your views. Check that any cus­tom SQL includes a test of the sta­tus column.

Check Your Rss Feed:

RSS feed of your content is generated as a by default on your Drupal site, which includes the feeds for your tax­on­omy terms. You could use Views RSS module in Drupal, this module allows more tight control over what content or stuff should go into your RSS feed. It is critical to take care of that because, in Drupal, the published nodes are promoted to the front page by default.  You can deny this access to rss.xml whenever needed.

Check Your Favicons:

If your sites have a favicon, then make sure that it’s dis­play­ing cor­rectly. If it’s not, then  you have to unselect the option for Drupal’s default fav­i­con in your theme settings to display on your site.

Site Mon­i­tor­ing

Con­fig­ure Statistics:

Not only security and reliability of a site are a big concern but monitoring is also a big job to do. You can use core statistic module to do the job. Using Advanced Sta­tis­tics set­tings com­pan­ion mod­ule or you can use any ser­vice such as Google Ana­lyt­ics to monitor the site usage is a better option to do.

Did we miss anything? Make sure to let us know in the comment section below. Like! Share! Subscribe for more!

Magento also takes steps to get improvised as new technologies arrive. You can now track shopper’s behavior, their preferences and previous history using Magento 2. This is the first Magento 2 advantage. That’s how Magento 2 makes ecommerce development easy.  By collecting all this data, You can offer them highly personalized experiences while they shop from your store.

2. Advanced Search

Many of the users are tech savvy nowadays. Thus the users love to use the search features. You can take advantage of this habit of your users and can suggest them a search page or content that they love to see. Magento 2 makes ECommerce development easy. Now you can use filtered search and faceted search to provide ease for your customers.

3. Streamlined Checkout

Magento 2 now have the new process to streamline the checkout process that tells us that the future of E Commerce is Magento 2. Magento 2 have cut down the shopping cart abandonment rate more easily as compared to the previous versions. So the checkout process has to address the deal rapidly without any hassle to achieve a high conversion rate. This is one more great Magento 2 advantage. E-commerce growth in 2017 with Magento 2 is increased just because of all these benefits of this great platform.

From Store Owners’ Perspective

1. Magento 2 Usability

Usability is one of the advantages of Magento 2 that can help you out why you should choose Magento 2 for building up an eCommerce site. All the tools at the backend like automation and management of order, sales, and shipping, the inventory of products and the reporting of the products and orders all provide the ease of use to the users and make the experience useful for backend users.

2. The Optimization Capability

Doing SEO on your site is the most important thing to do to make sure that the customers can reach to your site. Magento 2 do come with features that can optimize the SEO and SMO parameters with the modular approaches. Choosing it, let you use the drag and drop visual merchandising for product optimization.

3. Internationalization

Among many other Magento 2 advantages , the best in Magento 2 Development is the internationalization. This Magento 2 feature allows you to go beyond the national limits. So that international customer also has your services.  Magento 2 makes eCommerce development accessible by providing the functionality to support other languages and currencies of different regions of the world.

4. Responsive Design

Nowadays the customers prefer to buy online things using their mobile phones. If you have a site that is not mobile friendly, it can cause you a lot of trouble. By having responsive design feature, you can develop attractive eCommerce store with Magento 2 so that your customers can access your sites on their smartphone gadgets.

Magento 2 development provides cross-platform compatibility with cross- browser compatibility and device form agnostic compatibility for your website is an ideal platform for this era.

From Developers’ Perspectives

1. Open Source

Magento 2 development has made in PHP which is an open source programming language. That means Magento 2 is an open source platform which makes the ECommerce development easy. It allows the developers to use every kind of templates with proper extensions and modules with widgets. You can have documentations, training and consult regarding any situation by the Magento 2 community. the future of ECommerce is Magento 2 because it provides a program that is user-centric ECommerce storefronts.

2. Easy Integration

Now is the era of big data with NoSQL- like databases which mean that the integration of the store with the database is a significant conflict. Magento 2 makes eCommerce development easy by providing easy integration with the variety of databases that includes web/cloud services and third-party tools.

3. Magento 2 Compatibility

Magento 2 development is done on PHP framework including Zend that provides compatibility with latest versions of PHP. Also, Magento 2 works fine with databases including MySQL, Oracle, and Hadoop whenever there is a requirement.

4. Speed

You can quickly build User friendly Ecommerce Store With Magento 2 which provides 20% more speed as compared to Magento 1.x. Speed is the primary requirement that user wants from a website thus by having a feature to increase the performance Magento 2 is the most favorite platform used by many eCommerce store developers all over the world.

5. Smoothness

Magento 2 has JavaScript library as a default jQuery library which makes it a hassle-free CMS to use. That is why developers love to use it, and Magento 2 makes e-commerce development easy. By having default JavaScript library avoids jQuery and Prototype problems while developers create innovative features and functionalities.

6. Security

Because of the changes structure of directories in the source, Magento 2 is more secure than the previous versions, and we can say that future of eCommerce is Magento 2. The earlier version had nine folders in the root, but Magento 2 only have 5, and it has removed skin folder from the root directory.

The JS, SKIN, ERROR, etc. folders shifted to a new directory called “Pub.” This changes structure have made the Magento 2 more secure and more tough to steal or hack code directly from the root folder.

7. Rapid Development

“View in Module” – the new concept provided by Magento 2 development. The benefit that Magento 2 gives is it have removed complexity and reduced development time considerably, and e-commerce growth in 2017 with Magento 2 is growing. It helps in the creation of view that can start work immediately after the developer defines the configurations.

8. Flexibility

Magento 2 development offers the component based structure of modules. Modules provide the developers the freedom so that they can enable or can disable the components that they want or that they don’t want. This structure enhances the flexibility and performance of the Magento 2 based website.

Conclusion

Modern online business nowadays is becoming more and more challenging and more sophisticated. Mobile internet is accessible. Thus online stores are more trendy everywhere.

All the new and modern E-shops needed to get equipped with all the modern equipment so that the Online shops can meet the increasing expectations of the new generation shoppers. Magento 2 have accomplished many of them. Many features including flexibility, performance, security, exceptional shopping experiences, Magento 2 makes e-commerce development easy. And we can say that eCommerce growth in 2017 with Magento 2.

Lets us know the Magento 2 advantage that you considered while choosing Magento 2 for developing eCommerce store. Have we missed something? Comment in the comment section below and show us your love.

Meta descriptions have seldom to do with the direct visitors but it communicates an important message to someone coming to your website through Search Engines when they are trying to search something specific. Search engines use description on the SERPS, so it is the perfect opportunity to tell people about that particular page of your website before even visiting it.

• Through Audio, Videos & Photos

A brand can tell their story using photos and videos. Humanize the content on your website through the photos of employees (if permitted) or an engaging video about the product or services that your company is offering.

Videos can be a powerful communication tool. Instead of uploading promotional videos on the site, add some creative videos such as employees talking about why they love working here or the customers talking about the products and services they are receiving.

• Style, Design & the Layout

The layout of the website can communicate in a way as which part of the website is important to consider. A layout is important for many reasons and among them is, communication. Typically the site is laid out in a way so that the most important content will be given the most important attention.

• Colors & Logo

A well-designed logo will help in communicating your brand or services with the customers. In terms of branding, a message is being communicated through the logo whether it is professionally designed or some simple text in any website.

Colors are capable of communicating subtle messages to the visitors. Colors scheme are the most critical aspect of any web design, not just because they display how your website looks like but more often they have subtle impacts on the visitors and readers too.

Conclusion

The website is a digital extension of any brand, therefore, you need to understand what exactly your website is communicating to the visitors. Is it doing the right job of telling your brand’s story to the targeted audience? Does it reflect brand’s image, values, and goals?

To get a better idea, as how and what your website is telling visitors about the brand, look at some above few pointers to increase the communication of your brand’s story to your core audience.