Posts Tagged ‘magento development’

8 Reasons Magento Support & Maintenance Services is significant for Your Webstore

September 19th, 2017

When we say “MAGENTO “…..

The first thing that comes to our mind is a fantastic e-commerce platform for creating a thriving webstore.  It is a goldmine of amazing features like layered navigation, advanced search results, wish lists, favorites, product comparisons, multi-store features, one page checkout, tier pricing, inbuilt discount options based on shopping cart or per product basis,  grouped products, content management system for static pages, tonnes of reports as well as for SEO and marketing.

When we get in detail about Magento, we figure that these are the best features of Magento that are inbuilt:

  • Flexibility: Depending on the size, requirements, and budget of every business, the flexibility of Magento can be utilized to get the user-specific solutions
  • Developers Friendly: Magento is built by the developers for the developers. Magento has its learning curve but once a developer gets used to it, it’s the best thing they could ever get to build a complete e-commerce store. Developers find it really easier to work with Magento as all the e-commerce functionality is already present and it’s really easy to add pages to the website and link them to the sub or main navigation, thus saving a considerable amount of time.
  • SEO Edge:Magento SEO’ has solved multiple issues by facilitating better optimization of e-commerce sites. Page traffic, duplicate content, landing page, indexing, etc are efficiently managed for a website developed on Magento.
  • Order Management: It is one of the advantages of Magento in which Admin can handle their order fulfillment side of the business with ease, it integrates with tonnes of extensions like ship station which helps in the smoothening the order fulfillment for the owner, In the admin panel the admin can easily create, view, edit, raise invoices (one or multiple), print packing slips and other things for orders.
  • Open Source: Magento is a free E-commerce platform which uses open source technologies and programming languages, and the first key benefit of using Magento platform lies here. It comes for FREE!!
  • Marketing Tools: Magento e-commerce websites have various tools and technologies to promote your business. Some of the Magento Marketing tools are like Private Sales, Flexible Coupons, Catalog Promotional Pricing, Multi-Tier Pricing, Bundled Products, Landing page Tools for Campaigns, etc are some of them, so you don’t need to buy a lot of 3rd party tools as most of them come inbuilt with Magento.

 

After your store has been in the market for a while, Magento support and Maintenance becomes of key importance. As it has observed, performance of a Magento web store starts degrading after a year or two because of the amount of data it starts to hold, all the products, customers, orders, extensions take a lot of space in the database and if they are not taken care for, it starts to degrade the performance of your Magento website. So, Magento Support and maintenance services are really important for your website but that brings us to the below question.

 

What are Magento Maintenance and Support Services?

Magento Support and Maintenance Services is the best solution for all Magento problems whether it is slow performance, slow website speed, site crashing, malware issues or something else. Our Magento and maintenance services provide a ONE SHOP solution to all of the above and beyond.

 

Below are Benefits of Magento Support and Maintenance Services:

  • Up to date Magento Website:

After every few months, Magento new version is launched so for proper running of Magento webstore its timely updates are of great importance and that’s how Magento support services part is significant.

  • Optimized Magento Code:

Want to know vulnerable sections of the website and possible fixes for them? The optimal solution is Magneto Code Review.

  • Incessant Traffic:

Fast Processing of website can drive a lot of traffic to the website that in turn can help a lot in the Lead generation.

  •  Security:

Have no clue about how malware is affecting your website by stealing valuable information then Magento Security is a must-have service for your website.

  •   Backup:

A timely backup that will backup files on a regular basis so that sensitive information is maintained properly and is available at all the time with a click of a button.

  •   Latest trends and Techniques Guidance:

Have very little knowledge about your e-commerce; want best suggestions about which path to follow and which decision to take that will serve as the best solution for Magneto website then Magento Technical Consulting and Magento Training are of key importance.

  •   Efficient average page load time:

The only solution is by having Magento Dedicated Hosting Service as it can boost your average page load time during peak time.

  •   One Stop Solution:

Juggling with the issues like Magento Cache, Magento front end issues, Magento admin panel not working, Magento URL rewrites not redirecting properly and many other things? Magento Troubleshoot service is the best possible solution where Magento experts and developers can handle all these issues.

 

So, we can say that Magento is the powerful open-source e-commerce solution. It is designed to customize, manage, set-up and run online portal. It provides maximum flexibility, scalability, and control.  No matter how powerful Magento is… for healthy growth of Magento website Magento Support and Maintenance Services is very significant.

5 Simple Steps to Keep Your Magento E-Commerce site SEO Optimized

September 12th, 2017

We all know that SEO is extremely important for generating organic traffic to our websites. It is no different for your Magento e-commerce site. The organic traffic that comes to your website has a better chance of converting statistically than the one generated through paid marketing. This makes organic traffic and ranking on search engines even more important for the success of any e-commerce business. During Magento development, these tips should be kept in mind. If you are a novice and do not know all the intricacies of how to optimize your Magento website for search engines, just follow these 5 simple steps –

  1. Update your Magento Version

If you want to get a high rank on Google, you must make sure that you are using the latest version of Magento for your site. New updates have more features added for Magento security and bug fixes that can really be helpful for your online store. That is why updating your Magento is the first step and gives additional SEO support to the site.

  1. Optimize Images

The pages of e-commerce sites are 60% to 70% full of images. Search engines cannot understand what these images are about just from their pixels. That is why it is important to give a proper title and alt text to your product images. This helps in better indexing of the website’s pages. Also, make sure that you use your keywords in the image titles and alt tags.

  1. Optimize the URLs

To keep your URLs updated as per SEO guidelines, they should not contain any codes like product page codes or numbers. In order to keep your URLs clean from this code, you can follow these simple steps –

Go to systems > configuration >web>search engine optimization>URL options>set Add store code to “NO”

Now, the product category codes will not appear in your page’s URL.  You can also go into the search engine optimization option and turn the “Server URL Rewrites” to YES. This will also remove the index.php from your URLs.

  1. Remove Duplicate Content

When the same product appears n two separate pages of our Magento site or any content appears twice on separate pages, it is called duplication. Google does not appreciate sites that have duplicate content. You can correct this problem using a canonical link.

Go to System option>Configuration>Catalog>Search Engine Optimization>Set Canonical Link Meta Tags for Products and Categories to Yes.

  1. Generating Google Site Map

By submitting your sitemap to Google’s search console, you make your website’s pages easier to crawl for Google. Generating your site map is easy and can be achieved in the following way –

  • Go to catalog>sitemap>add new
  • In file type “sitemap.XML”
  • In the path field, fill out the name of the directory where the sitemap will be saved
  • In the store view, you can select the store view you set the sitemap of
  • Click on save and generate

By following these simple steps, you can optimize your Magento website as per SEO guidelines that will help it rank easier on Google and other search engines. A good search engine rank will ensure a healthy flow of organic traffic that will have a better chance of converting. Apart from these tips, ensure your Magento security is up to date and there are no bugs affecting the site’s performance. If you face issues, get Magento support services to keep your website performing to its best abilities.

 

Top Trends in Magento Development – 2017

September 9th, 2017

Magento is a platform that has dominated the market when we talk about e-commerce website development. Its user friendliness and levels of customization have made Magento the platform of choice for most online store owner for the last several years. In order to stay on top, Magento has to adapt to the current trends in online shopping. Changing user behavior and how they choose to interact with their online stores of choice calls for certain changes in Magento development and design.

Below are the latest trends in Magento development in 2017 –

  1. Focus on Mobile Shopping

With the millennials making most of their online purchases via their handheld devices like tablets or smartphones, the focus is now going to be on developing and designing Magento sites keeping mobile experience in mind as a priority over its desktop version. Apart from creating a responsive website for mobiles, mobile app development for e-commerce will also pick up the pace.

  1. The Influence of Social Commerce

Social media has become a very important aspect of our lives. Social media sharing is all the rage these days and users love to share content on the websites and stores they love. This provides a great business opportunity for e-commerce stores to capitalize on social media. The usage of various social media extensions for better integration with social media will be something every new Magento website will be implementing to make their website and its products more shareable.

  1. Personalized Customer Experience

Giving shoppers personalized experience on their sites is going to be a priority for e-commerce stores. The ever-increasing competition has made personalized shopping not an option that you can give to your customers but a must do activity if you want to stay in business. This, however, is easier said than done.  Magento e-commerce store owners will need to make the most of their website data and analytics to connect their website visitors with the relevant products that will attract them more.

  1. Change in User Interface

In order to generate more traffic and increase sales, user experience and your website’s user interface needs to change with the times. One of the most important factors is going to be the loading speed of your Magento store. Users like to visit those online stores the most that can load the quickest. If your site takes ages to load and has an overcomplicated navigation or menus, you are definitely going to lose customers forever. Some of the ways your e-commerce site can enhance its profits will include – improving website speed, creating simple navigation, easy to manage check-out pages, multiple payment options to name a few.

  1. Magento Security

Magento security is going to be a big differentiating factor between the numerous sites that exist on the internet today. If your visitors do not trust your website, they will never enter their payment information, meaning never make a purchase on your website. You need to present your customers with a secure payment option that will create a sense of trust in them. If your Magento store is facing security issues of incidents of data theft, you need to avail Magento support services to have your website’s security updated.

These above trends need to be followed by both e-commerce business owners and Magento design and development companies to make sure that your Magento stores can compete in today’s online market place and continue to grow your profits.

Infographic – Magento Support and Maintenance Services

September 6th, 2017

Magento is one of the most preferred platforms for creating e-commerce websites. The business of so many eCommerce companies depends upon the proper functioning of their Magento eCommerce websites. If your website has been in operation for over a year or two, chances are that may have already started to show signs of slow performance. The website may begin to load slower or certain product pages take forever to load. The occurrences of site crashing may have started to become more frequent.

Ecommerce is a very competitive segment and if your site does not perform well on the initial visit, you may lose that customer to your competition forever. This would result in losses for your business.  To avoid that, you must make sure that your Magento website is optimized to perform as good as new every time. You must also make sure your website’s security is up to date.
Clap creative offers various services under their umbrella of Magento Support and Maintenance Services. You can check out our infographic that gives complete details in an interactive manner regarding everything that we offer our clients as part of our Magento support service. Check our infographic here to know more.

infographic - Magento Support & Maintenance services - Clap Creative

Want to have Incessant traffic, Secure web store, Lesser processing time, experts solutions and other support services for your Magento Store. The following Magento Support and Maintenance Services from clap creative at a reasonable monthly rate will solve the purpose.

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.

5 Things Keep Your E-Commerce Site in Shape with Magento Support and Maintenance Services

August 14th, 2017

Whether you sell your products completely online or you also have a brick and mortar store along with your website, your e-commerce site is like the life blood of your business. Its health and smooth functioning are necessary for a constant growth of your business by offering your customers a flawless and simple platform for making their purchases. Any tiny glitch on the site can result in negative customer experience and cart abandonment. You may even lose those customers forever. To protect your e-commerce site from such occurrence, you need Magento Support and maintenance services.

It can be difficult to manage your website when you have traffic pouring in along with growing number of orders. As a store owner, you have other things on your plate like generating sales and fulfilling orders. You cannot be expected to deal with the hassles of maintaining your e-commerce website on your own. With professional Magento support, you can let the experts work on your website, thus resulting in better conversion rates.

The following are some of the benefits or advantages of availing Magento Support and Maintenance Services –

1 – Optimization of site performance

If your Magento based e-commerce site has been running for some time, there is a chance that its speed can get affected by certain inefficient codes. A Magento support expert can provide top codes to help optimize your site and improve the performance by reducing the load time of your pages. Server configuration can also help boost traffic and ensure that site does not crash when it has excessive traffic.

2 – Providing you with necessary training

As a store owner, you need to know about proper guidelines to follow to keep your site running smoothly. A Magento support company will train you so that you can handle the day to day working of your site and can also make minor updates yourself like updating images, adding new products, changing product pricing etc.

3 – Technical support

This is the main role of a Magento Support and Maintenance Services. There can be various major or minor that bugs that can fiddle with the proper functioning of your site. This reduces the number of site crashes and decreases cart abandonment. This support can also include making modifications to the appearance of the site.

4 – Installing Updates

Magento Support and Maintenance Services help you change the look and feel of your site by installing new attractive themes. If your website is running on an older version of Magento, that can be updated as well. They also install or remove extensions as per requirement. Some Magento maintenance service providers can also offer additional services like SEO and Paid online marketing as well.

5 – Maintaining Security

Magento Support and Maintenance Services also keeps your site protected against harmful malware and hacking. They also help retrieve hacked websites. Periodic scans and 24/7 monitoring are provided for the protection of your website. Installation of security patches is also done to keep the security of your website up to date.

Conclusion:

Magento e-commerce sites are complicated and need regular checks to ensure their good health. You need to avail the services of a company that has expert Magento developers that help maintain your site regularly. Clap Creative helps its clients maintain their e-commerce sites and optimize their performance, resulting in improvement of conversion rates and reduced downtime. For more information about our Magento Support and Maintenance Services, you can contact us for a quote today or get to know about our Magento services and maintenance plans here.

How to Speed up your Magento Store

January 17th, 2015

Magento raises the bar when it comes to high performance ecommerce platforms. It has quickly made a good following and is now a globally accepted platform for eCommerce owners. Even though it is highly popular, Magento tends to be quite heavy a CMS especially in its default settings. Only when right settings and configuration are applied, does the platform see a bump in speed. This can be quiet a task if you are a newbie developer.

There are many ways that can help increase the speed of Magento. These methods can also be applied on some other CMS systems which use PHP. So, let’s take a look at some easy to apply ways to help increase the speed of your Magento ecommerce store.

  • Minify CSS and JavaScript: Make sure that the JavaScript and CSS are compressed. This can lower the downloading, execution and parsing time. Numerous online tools can be used to minify these. Few notable ones include jscompress.com, minifycss.com, csscompressor.com and more.
  • Resize Images: This is a common step that will help you in multiple ways. Select a suitable image compressor and reduce the size of the image. The bandwidth between the server and the browser has to be lowered which is achieved well through image compression. Once again, there are many image compression tools available online that can help you do this such as LPEGmini.com, hkpegoptimizer.net etc.
  • Enable GZIP compression:GZIP drastically reduces the number of bytes required to be sent over the network and helps increase the speed. In some cases, it can cut the size of the CSS, HTML and JavaScript files by up to 70%.
  • Combine images using CSS sprites: To lower the server requests, combine the CSS sprites that lowers the number of files. Subsequently, bytes downloaded from the server can be bought down as well.
  • Cache control headers – It lowers the number of HTTP requests for faster page load times.
  • Apache KeepAlives–Shared web hosting can sometimes cause the browsers to close to limit the number of connections. Apache KeepAlives help increase them and maintain optimum connections between server and the browser.
  • Implement opcode cache mechanism – When a page loads, every time server has to read numerous files and compile them. Magentois usually subjected to heavy ecommerce so that means it can put significant amount of load onto the server. It can be regulated better using opcode cache. Nowadays, there are opcode caches built in to codes for faster execution. Accelerator, APC and Xcache are some opcode caches for magento.
  • Enable Memcache mechanism – Object caching system is a high performance, generic and distributed in nature. It manages the database load to better optimize the dynamic web applications. Simply enable this from the configuration file.

These are some of the Magento tips that can surely help you deliver a better user experience to your visitors. Search for more advanced tips to truly customize your Magento ecommerce store the way you want.