Posts Tagged ‘Magento security’

Magento Maintenance: Best Practices to Follow

November 1st, 2017

Today, Magento is the most popular platform for creating e-commerce websites. It offers you various levels of customization. This feature-rich CMS (Content Management System) is used to create online stores that are the lifeblood of so many businesses. E-commerce is a very tough sector to be successful in because of the high level of competition. This is why Magento maintenance is so very important for the profitability of your online business.

Why is Magento Maintenance Necessary?

As stated above, e-commerce is a highly competitive sector and you cannot afford your website to crash even for a minute. Customers have so many options these days. Think of all the effort you put in trying to bring traffic to your site. The moment the traffic gets to your site if it hangs or is slow to respond it creates a negative impact on their minds. What is worse is if the site crashes. Not only will these visitors leave the site without purchasing anything, they may never return to the website at all.

To keep a competitive edge over the competition, Magento store owners keep their sites up to date. The website that is the fastest to lead and gives users a seamless experience is the one that ultimately wins customer’s hearts.

Best Practices to follow for Magento Maintenance

  1. Regular Security Checks

Security has to be the primary concern for you with your Magento website. The emphasis on Magento security is so much because, on these sites, visitors enter their personal and financial information. This information can be targeted by hackers looking to steal it. Keep your alerts active and up to date regarding any malware installation. Use various log review tools to keep a check on unauthorized admin logins. Also, actively monitor FTP and SSH for any suspicious upload or activity.

  1. Removing Test Products

Test products should be removed as not only do they lead to inaccurate reports but also slow down your front end queries. Unnecessary test orders eat up important disk space which also has an impact on the processing of coupons. Removing these products will noticeably improve the overall speed and performance of the Magento website.

  1. Get Reliable Hosting Service

Choose a web hosting service that works as per industry standards to ensure the reliability of services. Double check the coding to ensure that security is up to date. Also, for added security and customer trust, use a channel that is HTTPS secured. This also helps in SEO as well because Google gives preference to websites that use HTTPS.

  1. Configuring Magento Site Cache

Configuring the cache of the website will improve and optimize its performance considerably. You can select varnish cache that acts as a web accelerator that is also sometimes referred to a reverse HTTP proxy. This varnish helps in optimizing the speed of Magento webstore by saving a copy of the page in the RAM the moment any user visits the page for the first time. This also assists in managing the traffic and performance of the website.

  1. Hire a Magento Maintenance Company

There are so many aspects of an e-commerce business that you need to take care of. Those are the core functions of your business that need your undivided attention. Also, not every Magento store owner is overly technically savvy. That is why it is best to hire a Magento maintenance company like Clap Creative to optimize your website and to maintain its health and security.

Why Clap Creative?

Clap Creative offers Magento support and maintenance services to keep your Magento webstore in perfect condition. Some of the services that we offer under our Magento maintenance services are – speed & performance optimization, backup & security, malware removal, code review, troubleshooting and more. Get a free quote today from us to get started.

Factors to Consider While Choosing a Magento Development Company

September 28th, 2017

Magento has become one of the most popular platforms for creating e-commerce websites all over the world. Many businesses choose to outsource the task of Magento development to a third party company that created their e-commerce site for them on the Magento platform. As your website is going to be the most important element of your online business, you need to careful while choosing a Magento development company to outsource to.

Below are some of the factors that you should keep in mind while choosing a Magento development company

Services You Need

There is a wide range of services that a Magento development company may offer you. From web design services to development, from Magento security services to Magento support and maintenance services, these are all services that a good Magento development company should offer. You have to decide whether you just want a standalone service or want to take advantage of a bouquet of Magento services. Once you have decided on that, you should look at the list of services the company is offering its clients.

Check out their Portfolio

Magento development companies like to show off their list of clients and the websites they have made for them on their website. This gives you a great opportunity to see the kind of webstores that company has created. You can not only see the design of the websites created by them but you can check out their functionalities by actually visiting those sites.

Their experience

Look into how many years that company has been in service. Always choose a company that has abundant experience providing Magento development and other Magento related services. You can do research on that company online and go through their website. It will let you know how long the company has been operating and how many Magento based projects they have worked on.

See their Online Reviews

These days you can check the reviews of any company online. Same goes for Magento development companies as well. There are several platforms where companies are reviewed, Yelp is the most famous and trusted of them all. You can read the reviews of actual users that have gotten their websites developed by various companies and know their experiences. You can also check out the ratings on Yelp to see how many starts out of five they have gotten.

Know their Level of Support

After your e-commerce store is developed, there might be certain issues that arise with it. Look into whether the company offers you support for your website even after it has been developed or they simply do not give any kind of support services leaving high and dry. It goes without saying that it is always wise to hire a company that will not only create your e-commerce store but also provides support in the event something goes wrong with the site.

 

By considering these above factors, you can rest assured knowing that your new Magento store’s development is in good hands. If you are looking for an experienced Magento development company, Clap Creative provides you Magento development services that will help your online business grow by creating an attractive and fully functional e-commerce site. Our years of expertise with e-commerce development is the reason why we have been the choice of numerous clients across the USA.

To know more about our Magento services or to ask for a quote, you can contact us today.

6 Ways to Keep Magento Webstores Secure

September 23rd, 2017

Magento is one of the most popular platforms for developing e-commerce websites. As per a recent study, Magento has a 27% market share when it comes to e-commerce platforms. When a platform is adapted at a large scale by businesses, the security risk to that platform also increases. On e-commerce sites, users enter their confidential financial information. Hackers and cybercriminals try very hard to obtain these details for committing financial fraud. That is why, security has become one of the biggest priorities of e-commerce site owners, especially Magento e-commerce site owners.

Below are some of the ways that hackers can attack websites –

  • Cross-site scripting
  • SQL Injection
  • Remote command execution
  • Breaking Authentications…..and more

With so many ways your site can get attacked, how will you maintain your Magento security for your webstore? Below are the top 6 methods that you should follow to keep your Magento based e-commerce site –

  1. Update to latest version

This is a very basic step that I really don’t think I need to emphasize on why it is important. Magento comes out with new versions of its platform periodically and each new version has better security features than the least. You can see the patch notes that are released to know what changes are made in the newer versions. These patch notes also alert hackers on the weaknesses of outdated versions of Magento so you the smart thing to do is to update your Magento.

  1. Choose a strong Username and Password

One the primary methods hackers try to hack into a site is to find out its username and password. Keep your password at least 10 characters long, using complex combinations of numbers, letters, and special characters. Never use any string of numbers that are related to you like your birthday, anniversary etc. Also, avoid using your own name or names of loved ones as these can be easily guessed even by novices. A smart thing would be to never save your password on your computer. You should also change your password after set time intervals.

  1. Use Secure SSL Connection

When there is a secure connection to your e-commerce site, it fills your customers with confidence about transacting on our site. Use SSL encrypted connection to ensure that the data being sent to your website or from your website is secure. If your connection is unencrypted, it can be intercepted by hackers. This can result in theft of your and your customer’s data. You can easily apply SSL by going to your site’s admin panel.

  1. Change Admin Panel’s URL

This is like thinking 10 steps ahead. To carry out attacks on your site and to try and hack its passwords, attackers need to access the website’s admin panel. By default, the admin panel can be accessed by visiting www.yourdomain.com/admin. This can give easy access to your admin page to anyone looking to break-in. Once on this page, they only have one step stopping them and that is knowing your password. So, why make it easy for them by not changing the admin panel’s URL. You should change this URL to a term that is difficult to generally guess to add more security to your site. You can do this at the time of Magento development or later on as well.

  1. Different Passwords for Different Accounts

Many website owners make the mistake of using same passwords for multiple accounts so that they are easier to remember. Whether you are using the same password as your other websites or the same password as your email ID, it is never a smart idea. Access to any one of these IDs would give a hacker control over all your websites. Keep a different and unique password for each of your websites and accounts to enhance your Magento security.

  1. Get Your Website Reviewed

You should get a regular checkup done for your Magento e-commerce site. Using a Magento support and maintenance service, you can make sure whether your website’s security is up to date or not. The Magento support providers can also update your Magento version and check for changes that can be made to your site to enhance its security. They can also scan for various Malware and if their presence is detected, they can remove them as well.

Your Magento website is your business’s online marketplace and its security needs to be the topmost priority. Follow these above tips to ensure that your data and the data of your customers remain secure and confidential the way it should be.

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.

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.