Blog Directory

Can you hear them? Can you feel the echoes of their digital footsteps? Do you know what it is? IT’S HOLIDAY SEASON! Industry experts are already expecting 2016 sales to be record-breaking. It all sounds really exciting, right? But, as they say, “Not everything is all sunshine and rainbows.”

Most of the eCommerce store owners like you are already overwhelmed or concerned about the surge of online traffic you are going to see because of increase in Online Shopping Trend! And it’s an ultimate nightmare of every eCommerce store owner when their website becomes slow or goes down permanently.

Don’t sweat! We are here to help you face this nemesis by providing you with an ultimate checklist on how to keep your Magento Store’s performance top-notch during this Holiday Season.

So, here are the 10 most important tips to speed up your Magento Store, enhance its overall experience for your visitors and come out victorious through this Holiday Season:

1. Calculate Your Server’s Projected Capacity

One of the most important things is to keep check of the capacity of your servers during the holiday season by doing some necessary calculations and estimations. Combating with the hustles and bustles of holiday season and keeping aware with trends must be handy to you if you have been in eCommerce industry for a considerable period of time.

Also, the most important thing here is to keep track of post trends. This will surely assist you in future holiday seasons by letting you guess or predict the user traffic over your site. And most important thing is to keep the backup of your Magento web store resources. For that, I would suggest you look into the Web Analytics software of your website for past data.

2. Design and Optimize your Magento Web Store

During the festive holidays, Magento Web stores tend to slow down because of the huge traffic influx. Well, do you know that even a 1-second delay can cause up to 7% decrease in conversion rates of a Web store? It’s too much to lose per second and for sure no merchant wants this to happen.

To control the situation out there you need to streamline your web store by checking and improvising the speed of your Magento Webstore. Eschew any performance hurdles that will result in an increase of the load time of the overall page. But the real question is how?  For that you can use caching mechanism and optimization. This will also help your Magento Webstore to bring good ranks in search engines’ results.

3. Make Your Magento Website’s Front and Back End Look Better

If you don’t talk to your customers, How will you know How to talk to your customers? – Will Evans, tlclabs.com

So if you really want to get most of your Magento website, you need to improve the front-end and the back-end interface at the same time. And for that clearly get rid of all the bumps and lumps beforehand. But, before doing so, make the backup of your server because once the changings are done, you cannot reverse things back.

Please go through the checklist below in order to get smooth operation of website:

1. Clear up your database and cache. This will make user to navigate even fast.
2. Delete all the products and the extensions that are unwanted or not in use. That will decrease the burden from your site and server. That is our goal right now.
3. Re-index your products effectively.
4. Merge CSS and JS files, so that you have better front-end performance.
5. Compress the output of the query. This will leave you with more space.
6. Use expires headers with parallel downloading. This is another good option in order to improve the interface of your Magento Webstore.

4. Load Test and Monitor Application Performance

Suppose that you predicted X number of visitors on your Magento website, but during the holidays the number of visitors exceeded than your expectation. Now at this point, you’ll get to see your website lagging in performance, and it starts to get worse with every additional visitor that lands on your website.

So when you tend to encounter such situations, do homework first. Well, you too have to do load testing of your site. Now, how would you do Load Testing? For that, you have to create a simulated environment and then check how the user traffic varies. This is done to ensure that the website runs smoothly once there is a real time traffic on the website. This is a kind of stress testing that we normally perform.

The above explained process is load testing but another factor which is very important here is Monitoring Application Performance. It has to be done when website’s performance is at the stake. Monitor the server performance like Varnish Hit Ratio, APC Hit Rate, Memcached Fill Ratio etc.

5. Use CDN and Page Caching

Well, you can encounter different situations where you have to use static contents and static pages on your Magento Web Store. To do that you need to use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). By using the CDN, you can use the global data centers. The global data center is the place where all of your data is kept. The advantage of doing so is that when an international user makes a request, it is catered by the data center located nearest to the user.

In order to enhance speed and performance of your Magento website, you need to load off that CSS and JS files. This will give you the advantage of engaging more and more concurrent customers to your Magento website for this holiday.

Also, you can cache your static pages. It is also one of the steps you can use to make your Magento web store faster. Use Varnish for that.

6. Mobile-friendly Web store

Today, many of the users use mobile phones, and during the holiday seasons almost 30% of the shopping orders are booked and sold via smartphones. So, in order to target the larger audience, follow the suit of other eCommerce sites like eBay, Amazon, Walmart etc. which are mobile friendly.

So make an eCommerce site that is optimized enough so that users can use them on their smartphones or any other mobile devices. This will help you to engage more and more global customer base with your Magento website.

7. Make an Order Fulfilment strategy that is Unimpaired

Let’s assume that you have ordered something online, but you didn’t receive your order on time? You will feel pissed off. And chances here are that you will decide never to buy anything from that online shop again.

There is a possibility that this can happen when you choose to shop things online. And, what if it is a holiday season? It would be too bad of an experience for you. Due to this situation, your Magento Webstore must have an order fulfillment and delivery strategy that is foolproof before the holiday rush starts and your website experiences a traffic hike.

Keep a check of things that are mentioned below:

A: Even if it requires you to revamp the whole infrastructure of your Magento website then I’ll suggest you dig deep and do it, because holiday is that part of the year when you make most of your customers.

B: Disable the extra extensions, if they are not in use.

C: If there is a need to hire additional staff in order to streamline the process of order delivery, then do it. Believe me, the profit you are going to make is much more than this.

8. Pump up the SEO, Organic, and Social Search

You have the most fabulous Magento website with the coolest products ever but what’s the use of it when no one knows about your website. What would be the point of making that store?

So, in order to let the world know about your Magento website, you have to plan a strategy so that your eCommerce website can rank higher in the search engines. You have to optimize your website in such a way that people notice your website. Search Engine Optimization is not dead, so let your website content do all the talk. All of the social media websites that includes Facebook, LinkedIn etc., are great in order to get better traffic and ranking on search engines.

After you have your product ready to go, launch it and get it reviewed. By doing so, you will get many positive and negative reviews from your customers. The positive one will help you boost out the traffic on your website whereas the negative ones will help you to remove any flaw or bugs from your web store and make it better, performance wise.

9. Giveaway Discounts To Your Loyal Customers

Indeed a happy customer is the most valuable asset for any business. It is a universal mantra that, customer is the king. Once you have taken a customer in your trust, they will start working for you by marketing your brand and your Magento website among other people by sharing their good experience with you.

If you want to enjoy the success on the basis of customers, give your promised customers an attractive discounts, deals, and coupons, or may be ask them to enroll in your web store’s lucky draw. Make them happy with your offerings. In return to this, always ask them to refer your web store to others. By doing so and giving deals and discounts relevant to holiday season, the traffic on your Magento Web store will surely boost up.

10. Check your Hosting Server

A slow website is a deal-breaker and has a bad impact on visitors, moreover, a cheap server host may not deliver performance. Many of the hosting service providers pretending that they are giving all you want but the fact is that they actually don’t!

These cheap hosting service providers provide you shared hosting. That means you have to share your site’s resources with other websites and as a result your website not only becomes slow, but also its security is at risk.

Searching for a solution?

If you need a solution for that, then you must look for a reliable, trustworthy and agile hosting service providers for your Magento web store. It may cost you a little more, but when the security, site’s performance and speed are more concerned, then cost is not a big deal, as your business’s reputation is at stake.

Conclusion

The festive holiday season can be grueling, but it is the time when you can make huge profit. So, gear up and make your Magento website ready for festive holiday, tackle all the unexpected issues and situations you might come across. All you have to do during this holidays is to create a holiday campaign calendar, get social and engage better with your Magento Web store. Also, make sure not to forget to keep testing your web store, as you don’t want your store to crash during the peak hours!

Want to ask questions? Keep in touch with me— Pronto!

Gabriel is a web developer with over 7 years of experience in the Magento eCommerce system. He is in the web development field for more than 11 years, which includes PHP, HTML, CSS, and jQuery).  His website is http://www.gabrielguarino.com/. Gabriel also carries a stack of Magento certifications, he is a Magento Certified Developer, Magento Certified Developer Plus, Magento Certified Solution Specialist and Magento Certified Front-End Developer. Gabriel has also been a Keynote Speaker at various Magento conferences.Today, we got the privilege to interview this multi-talented Magento specialist.

So, let’s get started:

Arpatech: Gabriel, you have 11+ years of vast experience in web development and more than 7 years of experience of working with Magento. What made you so interested in working for the e-commerce industry?

Gabriel: I’ve been working hard to improve my skills since I was very young. A time came when I was able to make progress fast and then I started to see the results of my hard work. I successfully implemented responsive HTML5 websites, following SEO guidelines and best coding practices. However, when I started working with Magento, I realized that my work had a big impact for both merchants and customers: A good Magento implementation led to sales for the merchants as well as it was a good buying experience for the customers too.

At that point, I decided to learn more every day and challenge myself to exceed all the expectations of my clients.

Arpatech: Gabriel, being a Magento Certified Developer you know the ins and outs of Magento? When anyone of us gets stuck somewhere in our projects, we Google about our query. What do you do when you face such problems? Do you prefer community or Google first?

Gabriel: Magento is a really complex platform, and you always find something that you need to investigate. After 7 years of extensive experience, I found that the best method to investigate a specific problem is reviewing the Magento core. But nowadays, developers tend to search and rely on Google for their every query and if they are unable to find the perfect solution to their query, they are stuck and they don’t know what to do. But my approach is different. Every time I wonder how to do something in Magento, I start searching for code samples in the Magento codebase or look for a similar feature in the Magento core, and I try to find the module and the class in Magento that is in charge of that specific feature.

To me this practice is really special since using this way, you can review the code that the Magento team implemented on the platform, and that means that you will follow the Magento conventions instead of just finding the solution somewhere else on the Internet.

Well, if you cannot find the solution in the Magento core, I suggest opening a new post in the Magento Forums or Magento Stack Exchange.

Arpatech: What is the most frequent myth that e-commerce merchant come up related to Magento. How do you overcome it when dealing it as a professional solution specialist?

Gabriel: Sometimes, I found merchants complaining about performance or even random issues which are hard to describe and hard to reproduce. But my perception is totally different. I found that Magento is not the reason for those problems, the reason is the bad implementation by some developers and system administrators.

Whenever, I am given the task to debug those websites, I found really poor coding practices, duplicated class rewrites, overloaded third party extensions, and so on. Magento is great, but the community should study the best practices and implement them in a right way so that the Magento website can function in a proper way.

Arpatech: Gabriel, you have all certifications of Magento. Please guide our readers on how to choose between these certifications. Many people want to learn Magento but are unable to find the perfect guidance. Please guide our newbie developers on how to get started with Magento.

Gabriel: If you are a newbie and just starting with Magento, I recommend you to read everything about Magento 2, including the available books and the Magento 2 Developer Documentation. If you have experience in Magento 1, you know that the “new era” has come: Magento 2. If that is the case, you can prove your knowledge in Magento 1 since that would be your credential that validates your experience.

Well, if you are a back-end developer or don’t have much experience with Magento, you can take the Magento Certified Developer certification. And if you have a lot of experience as back-end developer, then you can attempt the Magento Certified Developer Plus Certification.

If you are a front-end developer, then you should choose the Magento Certified Front-End Developer certification. Finally, if you are a consultant or project manager with experience in Magento, then you can choose the Solution Specialist certification.

Arpatech: We all have some mentors and motivations in our lives. Who are your mentors in Magento Community? How do you keep yourself updated in the community?

Gabriel: I don’t have a mentor in the Magento Community, but I try to follow the people who are really working hard to make Magento a reality and part of their lives. These people have an active participation in the Magento Community and they keep sharing their knowledge and experience. Also, I keep myself updated by participating in the Magento Forums, and by doing that I am able to solve the issues and problems of Magento Community and other people in charge.

Moreover, I keep myself updated by getting in touch with Magento Forums by Sherrie Rohde, reading the posts by professionals and latest articles at #MagentoMonday Community Digest.

In addition to that, I am an active Twitter user and I follow most of the Magento community members. Plus, I follow the #realmagento hashtag to be updated with the tweets that the community is posting with that hashtag.

Arpatech:  You are the keynote speaker at many Magento conferences. Please share your experience as a speaker, and also guide our readers about the advantages of being connected with Magento Meetups and conferences.

Gabriel: Having good knowledge and an extensive experience in the field of Magento, makes me satisfied when I share it with newcomers and experienced people in the field. I take it as a good opportunity to be a keynote speaker and deliver presentations about interesting topics relevant to Magento.

When I am connected to the Magento meetups and conferences I myself get a lot of knowledge about trending topics related to Magento. Also, I take it as the good opportunity as I get the immediate feedback of my queries from speakers and attendees. So, it’s the great time spent in the Magento events.

Arpatech: Many people have faced problems when moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2, so, as a developer how do you convince merchants to move to Magento 2?

Gabriel: Magento 2 is the upgraded version of Magento 1 and it has come with a lot of improvements, bug fixing options, and new features. Thus, we can say that this upgraded version of Magento will dominate the Magento 1 and nobody would be using the old version in three years or less. In addition to that, the Magento Developer Documentation team is doing a great job documenting every single aspect related to Magento 2, which is also important for the merchant since more documentation means that they have a solid e-commerce solution supported by the Magento team and the Magento community.

Arpatech: Now, let’s talk something besides your professional life. What do you prefer to do to in your free time? What activities do you do?

Gabriel: I love every type of sports and I have made it my daily routine to go GYM after my hectic workday. On Saturdays, I go cycling on rural roads. I used to swim as well but adding a swimming to my daily routine was little time taking, so I am not doing it these days and has a simpler routine. Apart from daily GYM and cycling on Saturdays, I like reading everything related to Magento and web development, so I always read something new at night before sleeping.

At times, the default Magento settings may seem too basic or could potentially lack the functionalities you want to have in your online store. Well, don’t worry, because, with little tweaks in Magento, you can make it work like a charm for your business. After all, we all want to create custom attributes for our desired brand to give it a personal touch, and that’s what this whole article is all about.

So, let’s get started with the basic attribute settings in Magento that can help you manage your products accordingly.

Adding Product Attributes

Go to Catalog->’Attributes’ and select ‘Manage Attributes’.

Click on ‘Add Attribute’.

Now, let’s name it “design”.  You can use any other name that suits your work.

Set the scope to ‘website’.

For this tutorial, we are making a drop down attribute for the product.

We don’t need unique value, so we will set it to no.

Now, we need the user to fill the value before proceeding. Set the values required to Yes.

Set input validation to store owner to none, as we don’t need validation for this attribute.

Now, select “Selected Products Type” in Apply To section. This is as we are only using this attribute in simple product. Select Simple Product.

Now, let’s set some front-end properties.

Set Use in quick Search: It is the search bar of your Magento website.  We set it to ‘yes’ so as to allow user to search for this attribute.

Advance Search: It is the advance search for your Magento store. We set this property to ‘yes’ so that the attribute is available in advance search.

Comparable on frontend: When customers are comparing products, would you like your attribute to be shown there? Select to ‘yes’.

Use in layered navigation: We set it to no as we don’t need it in the layered navigation.

Use in Search Result Layered Navigation: We set it to yes as we want to show in search Result of Layered Navigation.

Use For Promo Rule Conditions: If you want to use this attribute for promo or discount deals then set it to ‘yes’. For example: If we have a color attribute and we want to give all discounts to the red items on store, we can do this by enabling this on our magento Store.

Position: Now, this is bit tricky part. This is used to manage the position where the attribute will be displayed. If you have more than one attribute, the attribute with lower position number will be shown on top. Since we have only one attribute, so we will leave it blank.

Allow HTML Tags on Frontend: Set it to yes as we need HTML tags to display on front.

Visible On Product View Page On Frontend: Enabling it will allow the attribute to be displayed on product page before product tags. Set it to Yes.

Use For Product Listing: Set it to Yes.

Used For Sorting and Product Listing: In my case, it’s No.

Here’s how the configuration would look like:

Now go to Manage label/options.

Enter the name in admin. Write Design in admin.

Now, we need to give the options to the customer.

Example: We set two options for the customer:

Click on add option and fill all the fields with Round collar except for position. Set the position to 1 as we need to display it as a first option. Set it to default.

Now, repeat this and add another option with Crew Neck and set the position to 2.

Save the attribute.

Before moving forward, let’s learn something more about validation. Some validation won’t work for drop-down menus. You might want a text input. Simply select Text field from Catalog Input Type for Store Owner. You might need a validation for text field. Simply select the desired Input Validation for Store Owner. It can be changed to URL if you want to enter a specific URL.

Let’s proceed to attribute and set navigate to Catalog->Attribute and select Manage attribute sets. Once on this page, we can use the attribute set that we have already created or we can create a new attribute set.

To create new attribute set, click on Add New Set. I named it to Tee-Shirt. You can base this attribute to another attribute set. Here I used Default, based on property. Click to save attribute Set.

Now, on this page we can create groups and add attributes to them. But first, see the attributes of the left screen with a red circle. These attributes cannot be removed as they are default system attributes. Any attributed item without a circle can be removed. If you want to remove any attribute, simply drag and drop it to Unassigned attribute list.

You can see our newly created attribute in unassigned attribute list. Now let’s make a new group for this attribute.

Click on Add New and enter a new group name. I name it to My-Design.  Now drag our newly created attribute to the group we just created. Drag and drop design from unassigned attribute to My design group.  I moved design and color to the newly created group.

Click on save attribute set.

You are now the master of Attributes in Magento, but let’s test it out first.

For this, we will create a new product to test the attribute set.

Navigate to Catalog->Manage Products. Click on Add New Product. You can see your attribute set which you just created. Select ‘Tee-Shirt’ from Attribute set and continue.

You can see “My design”, the group we created. Select it and you will see the drop down box for design and color we added to the group.

We can even use existing groups and add the attribute to them. We can simply add it to “General” or any other group which is suitable.

This is how attributes in Magento works. I hope you were able to successfully create your first attribute in Magento. If there’s something that you need to discuss or felt that something’s missing, feel free to comment in the comments section below.

Meta Description Tag or simply as we call it: Meta Description, is a little description of the page that tells both the user and the search engine about the page’s content. They don’t show up anywhere on the page, but are available in the code. Meta Title and Meta Description both appear when you search something on search engines, and the results that you see are actually Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions.

This is how Meta Descriptions appear in search results:

Advantages of Using Meta Description For SEO:

Now, before executing SEO for your website, the main part is On-Page SEO. We actually have to keep two different perspectives in mind when writing Meta Descriptions:

1. User Side
2. Search Engine Side

Let’s first discuss the User Side:

• User Side:

Writing smooth, catchy and attractive Meta Descriptions helps both the user and the search engines to better understand your page. It’s a fact that poorly written Meta Descriptions would yield bad results and may affect CTR (Click-Through Rate) and Search engine rankings.

So, now let’s discuss search engine side:

• Search Engine Side:

The biggest question is, “How search engines works and how they pick Meta Descriptions?”

It all begins with what keywords or phrases would you like to appear in Search results, like, if we are a Furniture Company that makes furniture only in San Francisco, then these are the keywords or phrases that we would target in our Meta Description for our company:

Our keywords that we are going to target on a specific page:

1. Furniture in San Francisco
2. Furniture Supplier in San Francisco.
3. Buy Furniture in San Francisco Online

We will make sure that these words surely appear in our Meta Description: Furniture, Supplier, Buy, Online and San Francisco.

So, this was just a basic explanation of how keywords and phrases are used in meta-descriptions to make our page relevant for both the users and search engines.  I hope that this article must have cleared the concept in your mind, and if there is something that needs to be clarified, comment in the comment sections below and we’ll make sure that you get an answer from our side.