Posts Tagged ‘Magento Developers’

Why You Should Migrate to Magento’s Latest Version

May 25th, 2018

It has been 8 years since Magento was first announced to the e-commerce industry back in 2010 but its beta version was only made available to the merchants in 2015 with a couple of more recent editions till date. And the reaction of Magento community? Well, it kind of mixed where though most people are excited about these latest releases, there are many still contemplating whether migrating or upgrading to Magento’s latest version is worth all the hype. In this article, we will help them make the right decision.

What about Magento 1?

Initially, Magento was built as a flexible platform allowing its users to create multiple storefronts with the help of pre-made extensions or through coding chops. However, this defining feature of Magento 1 not only came with its own set of drawbacks that severely affected its user-friendliness but certain important tools were also missing right out of the box, tools such as mobile responsiveness, performance optimization, admin capabilities etc.

Due to this, a great many complaints were registered for the sluggishness of Magento 1 version. Though changes were made, they weren’t enough to have any lasting effect on the underlying issue of core speed. As a result, the programming experts in Magento team worked hard for over 5 years to design this upgraded platform known as Magento 2.

What changes can we expect in Magento 2?

Let’s begin with the fact that there’s no turning back for Magento. Sooner or later, the Magento community will learn to work with Magento 2 series up until the time Magento 3 is introduced into the market.

Also, not upgrading to Magento 2 also means that after a certain time, you will stop receiving any security or functionality updates for your themes, plugins and the overall platform itself.

So, instead of thinking about some vague benefits you might or might not get in the future, let’s talk about some of the certain changes we can expect the moment we migrate to Magento’s latest version.

  • Magento has introduced new admin user interface that can easily be rendered on mobile, other features of this admin panel include responsive design and customizable grids for better control of product filters.
  • Magento 2 offers a new code base that simplifies the customization of its various stores and makes deployment that much flexible. Also, the APIs used are much more efficient in allowing Magento developers to operate with any 3rd party solution.
  • Though product creation and rich content has always been one of Magento’s primary features, its latest version, with the help of integrations with YouTube and Vimeo and a newly guided product creation workflow has facilitated much more efficient response times, making the overall process less demanding in the backend.
  • Magento 2 has greatly enabled the efficiency of site owners to operate more freely, thus helping their businesses grow faster. Thanks to the by default indexers in Magento 2 that transform all the user data into index tables that help boost the query speed and improve the performance of your Magento store.
  • Earlier, creating content was strictly limited to the user’s ability to code (or required outsourcing) but with Magento acquisition of Bluefoot, improvements in creating new content along with page builder module are on its way and can be expected to integrate directly into Magento coding as an upgrade assistance in 2.3 version.
  • Another change in Magento 2 is the simplification of checkout process that requires much less information and completes the process in few steps. Also, customers can directly create their account on the order page. All this has greatly improved the conversion rates along with enhancing the customer’s shopping experience.

How long will it take to migrate to Magento 2?

There are a number of factors that affect the amount of time it takes for the migration to complete such as the complexity of store, data migration requirements, number of customizations, extensions required etc. but typically, for an average size store with minimal 3rd party integrations, it normally takes from 3 to 6 months.

What will this migration cost?

Due to the varying nature of Magento projects, predicting the exact cost of migration is pretty hard. Your choice of Community or Enterprise edition will also have a considerable impact on pricing. You will get exact estimates only after the evaluation of your current Magento implementation by a reputable web design company.

Will the migration be an inconvenience?

I wish I could have sugarcoated this but the answer is yes, it will be inconvenient during the migration period and may require extra investments. Because of the vast difference in the internal structure of Magento 1 and 2, this upgrade will require a complete database migration. Unfortunately, even then you cannot transfer 3rd party extensions and code customizations. Also, your SEO may suffer too unless you take care of 301 redirects first.

Bottom Line:

It isn’t the question of, whether you should migrate or not but when you should do it because sooner or later, your only choices will come down to, either upgrade to the progressive Magento 2 and be a part of this ever-growing community or pack up and go home. So, choose wisely.

Top Reasons to Migrate to Magento Store

March 29th, 2018

Magento, the world’s biggest e-commerce platform, offers tons of options for customization and integration to its users along with full flexibility and control in order to operate efficiently as well as support rapid growth. No wonder, it’s the prime choice of over 200,000 retailers worldwide ranging from small business owners to e-commerce giants. First released in 2008, Magento has outgrown its competition long ago and proved its dominance by satisfying all online shopping preferences.

Currently, there are 3 versions of Magento Development platforms available in the market.

  1. Magento Community Edition or Magento CE is the free version which is built using the open-source software and provides hundreds of themes, templates and plugins that are absolutely free to use and offer a full range of functions to fulfil every need of the store owners such as site design, payments, shipping, products and much more.
  2. Magento Enterprise Edition or Magento EE is the paid version of the e-commerce platform which allows the easy set-up and management of high-quality search results in more than 30 languages along with certain business management tools such as Drag and Drop Tools, Easy Product Creation, intuitive Admin Interface etc.
  3. Magento Go is also a hosted, SAAS service provider which is more suitable for small and emerging businesses that prefer a simple online store without the complexity of managing servers and software. Even the cost of purchasing and maintaining this robust platform is also kept bare minimum to assist small-scale retailers.

Apart from this, Magento offers its own marketplace to its consumers known as Magento Connect where one can get thousands of free and paid extensions befitting their every need as an entrepreneur. And believe me, this is just the start.

Magento community offers so many features that it’s difficult to include everything in this post. Still, I will try to include as many top reasons as possible as to why you should consider migrating to Magento if you haven’t already done so.

  • Out-of-the-Box Solution

The first and foremost reason lies in its basic structure which is designed to house your overall online presence and offers a complete out-of-the-box solution to all your e-commerce related queries including dozens of specialized tools to let you manage shipping costs, discounts, wishlists etc.

  • The Magento Dashboard

Magento dashboard provides a major benefit to retailers who are in the continuous lookout for ways to improve the performance of their e-commerce store as it comes power-packed with a vastly improved layout, professionally designed themes and templates, and a wide array of data visualization tools.

  • Single Page Checkout

The user-friendly checkout process of Magento allows its customers to place orders with few steps apart from helping in reducing the cart abandonment rates and improved conversions. It even allows guest users to easily create an account directly from the order page (of course registered users have single-step checkout options)

  • Magento Product Types

The control and flexibility Magento gives over your products is incredibly enticing. Check out for yourself

  1. Simple Products (no variations over color or size)
  2. Configurable Products (inventory for one product’s multiple options)
  3. Grouped Products (collection of simple products)
  4. Virtual Products (basically services that you offer)
  5. Bundled Products (combo of simple or virtual products)
  6. Downloadable Products (all online downloadable things)
  • Better Performance/Scalability

The built-in full-page cache is one of Magento’s strongest feature that supports up to Varnish 4.0 with HHVM 3.6 which further compiles PHP code on the fly. It also allows database sharing through the functional area by the product information to be stored in different DB server that can be retrieved at a much faster pace.

  • Easy Customization

Magento with the help of the PHP package manager lets everything specific to the module to be handled directly from a single directory. This, in turn, allows easy customization as well as maintenance of that customization by separating the business and presentation logic even during the installing of product patches.

  • Multiple Store Management

Another key feature that Magento is known for is its capability to host multiple websites with a single back-end admin panel. In simple words, with Magento, you will be able to easily manage numerous stores, offer the same products, share same categories but with the freedom to choose different prices and languages.

  • Collaboration with Google

Magento allows you to run your e-commerce store successfully by keeping track of visitors and sales with the help of certain Google services it has conceived through collaboration namely-

a) Google Analytics furnishes you with relevant data obtained through significant metrics such as lead rates, campaign results, conversion rates etc.

b) Google Checkout, an online payment processing service, has integrated with Magento to simplify the process of online purchase for its users.

c) Google Base keep track of your best-performing products along with optimizing your shopping feed’s title, categories, descriptions etc.

Closing Thoughts:

As we have seen above, Magento gives us more than enough reasons to migrate. Some we have seen above, others include advanced search, layered navigation, product comparison, SEO performance and much more. As an open source software, it is updated on a regular basis by designers which means an endless supply of new features for you along with support from the much larger Magento Community. So, what are you waiting for, hire Magento developer, and be on towards your journey to success.

Magento E-Commerce Development Tips for Better Store Performance

November 30th, 2017

There is a lot of competition online between different Magento-based e-commerce stores. In this highly competitive marketplace, online store owners will do anything to gain a competitive edge over their competition. However, most people do not know that the key to gaining an advantage over your peers is hidden in your Magento e-commerce development techniques. By incorporating certain things into your website at the point of development or even after it, you can enhance your store’s profitability.

In this blog post, I will be discussing certain tips that can prove to be highly useful for every Magento website. Here they are –

  1. Make the site SEO friendly

SEO is what helps websites get recognized online and draw in traffic. This traffic later converts into buyers and increases your business’s revenues. From the initial phase of developing a website, you must ensure it is SEO friendly, meaning as per the SEO guidelines set by Google itself. In this scenario, hiring a Magento developer with SEO knowledge will be an added advantage.

One of the things that are the most important for ranking well through SEO is the website’s loading speed. A website that loads faster will rank better in terms of Google’s algorithm.

  1. Easy Sign-Up Process

If your website does not allow users to buy products without signing up, you need to make sure that the sign-up process is not overly complicated. There should be ideally no more than two or three steps in the entire process. Any more than that and your customers may rethink their decision to buy the product from you. The truth is that no one likes a long and tiring sign-up process.

By taking care of this one little thing at the time of Magento development, you can help yourself convert visitors into customers.

  1. Local Currency Option

If you cater to international audiences and sell your products to more than one country, it will be better to have your website automatically adjust the currency as per the visitor’s location. When customers visit your website and see foreign prices, it can be very off-putting. To make sure that you do not lose these customers to a local competitor, they must be able to view the prices of all the products in their own local currencies.

  1. Improved Shopping Cart Experience

The shopping cart experience is so crucial to the success of your Magento store that I cannot stress it enough. If the visitors go through your entire site, add products to the cart and everything goes perfectly, it can all be for nothing if they have a negative experience with your shopping cart. The best thing is to use subscription-based and fully hosted shopping cart services by Magento.

Simple to use shopping cart that gives a clear description of the products and their individual and total price will help you convert customers easily and avoid any cart abandonment.

  1. Using the Power of Social Media

Social media is a very effective tool for increasing the popularity of your website. If used smartly, it can help you with your online marketing efforts. Embed social media sharing plugins in your Magento site that will allow visitors to share various products online on their favorite social media platforms.  When users share your products online with their friends, it ensures increased traffic on that page and increased sales as well.

By following these simple but effective Magento e-commerce development techniques, you will not only gain a competitive edge but also see an increase in your website’s conversion rates. To hire Magento developers that can utilize these and many more methods to enhance your site’s productivity, contact Clap Creative for a free quote today.

Protect Your Webstore with Our Magento Security Service

August 28th, 2017

Magento is one of the most preferred platforms for creating a successful e-commerce website. In order to keep your Magento site safe and secure, you need to maintain proper Magento security and backup protocols by choosing a Magento Security Service.

Why should you choose our Magento Security Service?

Our recent success story with our valuable client Cloud Vapes says a lot.

CloudVapes is a 14 time best product award-winning vaporizer company. Their Magento Website was suffering from severe malware issue in which the hackers were stealing their customer’s credit card information. This was a big nuisance to them and was damaging their online reputation. Our Magento Support and maintenance Service was a big relief for them as we not only helped them in regaining trust among their existing customers but also got more customers for them by moving their current Magento website on our secure dedicated hosting servers.

Our Magento Experts and developers examined their problem properly and came up with the best possible solution for them. We implemented the following services on their site and made it secure and trustworthy:

  • Clean up their existing code of malware
  • Moved their website to our servers
  • Set up a firewall to stop Russian and Chinese hackers
  • Run 6 hourly automatic malware check on the site
  • Run Weekly manual malware check on the site
  • Optimized the site for better load times
  • Setup backups

Some basic Magento Security Tips that you can use to protect your website:

  1. Use the latest version: Magento rolls out its latest version very frequently, which includes general maintenance and bug patches, along with security fixes that address newly discovered weaknesses. The latest version does not mean that the best but it has some more features and fixes the problems in the preceding versions. So it is better to keep updated regarding the Magento security concerns.
  2.   Use two-factor authentication: Magento password alone is not enough so here Use two-factor authentication comes into the picture. For example, Rublon is a good two-factor authentication which provides two layers of protection. It allows trusted devices to access Magento backend using a smartphone app. NOTE: It can be downloaded and installed from https://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/catalog/product/view/id/20117/
  3. Set a custom path for the admin panel: When hackers are able to access your admin page, they’ll have a much easier time launching brute force attacks to figure out your password. By default, the standard URL of your store’s admin panel on Magento is yourdomain.com/admin. Change the /admin of your website’s URL into a unique term to make your panel much more difficult to find.
  4. Backup your Website Frequently: For convenience and accessibility, taking regular backups of your website is recommended. It is one of the best practices.
  5. Use Secure FTP: One of the most commonly used methods to hack a site is by guessing or intercepting FTP passwords. To prevent happening it with you, it’s essential that you use secure passwords and use SFTP (Secured File Transfer Protocol) which uses a private key file for decryption or authenticating a user.
  6. Keep your password secure: Update your password on a timely basis and keep it strong and unique that cannot easily be guessed.

At the end, all we can say that no matter how many tips and tricks are available online regarding securing our Magento website but expert’s advice does matter. At Clap Creative, we are your go-to guys for securing your Magento website. To get started, contact us to know about our Magento and maintenance services today.