10 Must have Skills of Magento Developer in Magento Development Services

If you are one among the young aspiring business people, who are searching for a great opening of their E-commerce project, then you are at the right platform and reading the right article. With Magento development services you can own a clear E-commerce store.

However, to acquire the undeniable advantages of this open – source platform, you have to use Magento designer for getting ideal benefits in setting of business growth and income generation. These passionate web designers try to execute best of class web development ventures for your business.

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With the increasing demand of exclusivity in E-commerce industry, the established as well as the rookie businessmen are switching to conventional shopping stores rather than the traditional ones which were used earlier. The main question, apart from choosing the best web development platform, is how would you know if the designs and development strategies which your hired Magento developer is applying are correct or not? It would be difficult for you to know it if you are not that technically sound.

But don’t worry, here is a list of 10 brilliant qualities which you can search for while hiring an expert Magento developer.

Recommended For You: Is Your Magento Website Slow? Speed It Up With These Tips

1. Developer’s Knowledge

The developer ought to have proper knowledge of all the technical fields. Additionally, he must show an enthusiasm to learn about the latest ideas and updates identified with his portfolio. This would enable him to understand the limitations and developments of the web business.

2. Innovative Mind

If you want to create a unique commercial portal, you have to hire an innovative web developer who has faith in researching new ways to create unmatched web designs, webpages, and so on for your business growth.

3. Imaginative Perspective

An experienced developer ought to hold an imaginative perspective to convert your business a success. He could work in line with the strategies of your business brand. Such a developer is fit for building an undeniable website from scratch.

4. Professionalism

Professionalism of your developer makes an intense effect on your business and also on your customer base.

5. Multi-tasking Ability

A passionate developer understands multi-tasking ability which gets exhibited while working on business projects.

You May also Like: 8 Reasons Magento is the Best Choice for eCommerce

6. Marketing Knowledge

Creativity of a developer is a demonstrated advantage of enlisting an expert hand. They build exceptionally inventive and creative shopping stores that keep clients down to the site.

7. Quality of Work

Ensure that your magento developer is utilizing quality techniques and technologies as a part of your web ventures.

8. Experience of Developer

It is better to check the portfolio of the web developer before employing because experienced designers are reliable and responsible for their work and developments.

9. Awareness of your Business

The principle motto of your web designer is to understand the business motives, so that he can arrange out methodologies to take care of your demand.

10. 24/7 Availability

It is good to hire a web developer who is available day in and day out all through the process. They are capable of completing tasks on time without compromising quality standards.

Therefore, you can consider these 10 qualities before employing your web developers. Always keep in mind these skilled developers of Magento development services adopt brilliant methodologies to deliver demand specific projects ranging from Magento customization to upgrading and then to development.

WooCommerce vs Magento Development Services: Which to Choose?

E-commerce is one of the fastest growing sectors on the internet, irrespective of the companies managing physical or virtual entities. It is not an easy task to set up an e-commerce website and sell online. Web development is a complicated task which involves several important decisions. Among those decisions, deciding the right e-commerce platform is most important for an ecommerce. There are certain reasons that makes us choose one platform over the other.

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Magento is a popular content management system which is used specifically for e-commerce. It has several unique features and functions that can help small online shops transform into huge ones. Some of the powerful features of Magento include up selling, cross selling, comparisons and discounts which make it an excellent choice for businesses which focuses on online sales. Multiple online stores can be pulled together into one dashboard with the help of Magento development services. Global brands like Nike, Samsung and Olympus have been using Magento as their e-commerce platform.

Read Also: 8 Reasons Magento is the Best Choice for eCommerce

Features of Magento

  • Specifically made for e-commerce

  • Most appropriate for large e-commerce websites

  • Able to manage multiple stores in an excellent manner

  • It has a steep learning curve

  • Includes complex management system

  • It is a very strong platform

  • Selling more than 2500 products

  • Multiple variations in products

  • Its business is done on the basis of e-commerce

WooCommerce is an open source e-commerce framework for WordPress. All the e-commerce fundamentals are done by WooCommerce. Unlimited number of products can be uploaded and categorized using this particular platform. With the help of this platform, users are able to feature best sellers, add reviews, filter by category, and search by product name.

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Features of WooCommerce

  • It has strong basic functionality

  • Specifically designed for small and medium sized enterprises

  • Most appropriate for smaller websites

  • Easy to use

  • It has got limited functionality

  • Similar to the interface of WordPress

  • Its business has got additional focus

  • Products have few or no variations at all

There are certain reasons by which we prefer these two platforms over the other:

  • Cost Effective Development

One of the greatest benefits of using WooCommerce and Magento is that they are free e-commerce platform. There is no need of any hidden costs and subscription fees. Hence entrepreneurs can significantly reduce project cost and spend most of their time on development.

  • Open Source Success

Since WooCommerce and Magento are free e-commerce platforms, users will have access to everything associated with the platform. Once the website is created, the creator will be the owner and can enjoy every right related with it. Code completely belongs to them and they can do whatever they want with it.

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  • Flexible, Secure and Robust

Some of the qualities of WooCommerce and Magento development services include excellent support, outstanding security and a series of powerful e-commerce features. These specific features help these two platforms hold 40% of all e-commerce websites. Magento is a complex platform with advanced structural and functional platform which is specially made to e-commerce websites whereas WooCommerce is specially devoted for shopping platform and can be easily installed in any content management system. It takes more time to set up and customize Magento when compared to WooCommerce. While comparing with Magento development services, WooCommerce is the best choice for beginners and it is also very easy to use.

Before deciding which platform to use, one should think about the size and complexity of their shopping platform, number of products, capital investment and expectation of their business growth. Based on the above mentioned features, one can carefully choose among the two platforms to achieve greater results.

The Best Magento Development Extensions for Blogs

Blogs are an extremely important part of websites. It nurtures your website with valuable thoughts and, information, news and much more.

Here is some of the best Magento Development Blog Extensions:

1. Blog – Community Edition by aheadWorks

The blog extension from aheadWorks is reckoned as the best for creating buzz and word of mouth marketing tips. It not only provides you regular customers with up -to- date information but brings additional visitors to your site, builds relevant SEO-friendly text links, and serves as assistance in building sales strategy. This Magento blog extension helps you in creating relevant and valuable content to attract and engage target audience.

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It gives you a noteworthy opportunity to communicate with your regular customers and casual visitors. With a blog you can create an interactive two-way communication platform to provide official information on your store news, upcoming products, promotions, and get customers’ feedback.

Blogging has proved to be one of the best effective marketing tactics. If your customers feel that they are listened to and their needs are responded to, they are more likely to come back to your store again and again.

2. nBlog – Blog Extension by Neotheme

nBlog from Neotheme enables you manage your blog without need of any additional framework. This extension is integrated into Magento backend so your eCommerce store and blog are both in one place. You can change blog layouts from the backend without need of any programming knowledge. Moreover, you will have complete control over the blog publish date and time.

3. Blog Pro

Blog Pro from MagPleasure is a new and extra powerful Magento blog extension of excellent quality. This blog extension comes with the social sharing ability which means you do not need to add any extra tools to allow your customers share your blog posts on social networking websites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn etc. It has intuitive interface that makes it easy to control each aspect of blog posts such as tags, description, comments, category, URLs, author etc.

Read Also: 6 Amazing Magento Extensions to Improve Your Online Store

4. Simple Blog

Simple Blog Magento extension gives you an opportunity to run blog for your eCommerce store and helps you boost your content marketing activities. It is easy to install and manage extension comes with 15 days money back guarantee.

5. CMS Pro News/Blog by MageWorld

Manage your eCommerce store news and blog easily. CMS Pro News/Blog by Mageworld Magento extension is very useful and easy to install. It works brilliantly without any issue and delivers exactly what it promises. Customers who visit your store will see the latest news on the home page as well as the side bar. You can control the number of blog news to be shown per page with pagination support.

6. Blog Post

As we all know, today it is impossible to imagine a website without blog since blog is one of the effective ways to tell people about your blog stores upcoming deals and offers. It helps you interact with your customers. Blog Post – a Magento blog extension from Magegaga is a handy tool that helps you present the information on your Magento store and increase store traffic.

7. Blog by Innobyte

One should use this extension to communicate the latest Information (how to buy, current promotions, latest arrivals or even job openings) to regular buyers and on- site visitors. With this extension you can have user – friendly links which increase the opportunity to attract new visitors to your store. This extension is compatible with CE and EE edition and comes with 30-day money back guarantee. With Blog by Innobyte, it is easy to manage and create your store’s own blog.

Recommended Read: 6 Major Companies That Provide Magento Extensions

8. Magik BlogMate

Magik BlogMate is a very powerful, yet simple blog extension for Magento eCommerce websites. It provides an easy way to keep your customers connected with your store announcement and offers. It also helps build SEO – friendly URLs for better link building strategy. This extension enables you to create an unlimited number of categories disable comments for some post.

9. Marketplace Blog

Marketplace blog enables you create blog posts for your lovely customers and improve shop presence on the internet. Blog is one of the ways to improve shop sales and conversation. Use this extension for your Magento eCommerce store which comes with WYSIWYG editor for the blog post creation and generation of SEO friendly URLs.

Installing Magento 2 for your Online Store

Magento Development Company has released its latest version Magento 2. It became a major release for magento as it has so many architectural changes in it. The level of magento installation is very high in this version. When compared to its previous version, it is harder to install Magento 2.

Here are the details about the installation of Magento 2:

For installation of Magento 2 you need a web server with programming language as PHP and a database server such as mysql. The following are the conditions to install magento development services on your local computer.

1. A Web Server

Web Server can be either Apache or Nginx. The version of Apache can be 2.2 or 2.4. The version of Nginx can be 1.8 or higher version.

Read also:Magento Setup: A Guide to Move from Magento Go

2. A Database Server

The database server to be used for installation of Magento 2 is Mysql 5.6.

3. Programming Language

The language can be PHP 5.6 or higher. The following extension should be enabled:

a. PHP Data Objects or Mysql

b. Mcrypt

c. Mbstring

d. Mhash

e. Simple Extensible Markup Language

f. Curl

g. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)

h. GD Library or ImageMaick

i. Simple Object Access Protocol

j. Intl

k. Openssl

Steps for installing Magento 2

STEP 1: Download magento 2

You need to download magento 2 from Magento Website Download Page. Then select the one you want to install. If you want to install with sample data choose download with sample data. Extract the downloaded file in the XAMPP htdocs (directory) folder once downloading is completed.

STEP 2: Create database for the magento 2

Once XAMPP is installed it comes along with Mysql and XAMPP panels to manage Mysql database. These are the steps to be followed for creating database for installation of Magento 2.

a.http://localhost/phpmyadmin/is the Uniform Resource Locator   (URL) on the your browser

b. By clicking the above URL you will get a web page

c. On the homepage of phpmyadmin, click on the database tab. Otherwise you can click on highlighted tab with red border which is the database tab

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d. On the database page, a small text box with “create new database” appears on the bottom. Enter the name of the database you want to use. After that click on the create button

Step 3: Open Magento Installer in Browser

Step 1 and step 2 are compulsory for the installation of Magento 2. After completing step 1 and step 2, you can open the http://localhost/magento2 in the web browser. In this URL is the name of web server and magento 2 is the folder having unzipped magento 2 code files. You will get a screen with version details and terms and agreement. To read terms and agreement you can click on the option Terms and Agreement And if you need to proceed further click on Agree and Setup Magento

STEP 4: Readiness Check

After clicking agree and setup Magento button, readiness check screen of Magento 2 installation wizard appears. Here in this step Magento 2 want to ensure that all the required PHP extension are installed in the computer. You need to click on “Start Readiness Check” button on the readiness check screen. After successfully completing readiness check you can click next button to proceed with the database step.

Recommended read:Why Choose Magento For Your Responsive Site?

STEP 5: Configure Database

If readiness check is completed, then the next step is to add database credential to Magento 2. A form will be appeared on the screen for entering database credentials.The information include the following:

  • Database server name

  • Username of your database server

  • Enter the database password

  • Table prefix is optional so you can leave it blank

After filling the details you can click Next button.

STEP6: Web Configuration

After completing the information regarding database, the next step is to configure URL. A form will appear which ask for Your Store Address and Magento Admin address. In the field Your Store Address there is no need to change anything. But in Magento Admin, replace with “admin” and click on “next” button. Advance option will also be available there. These are not compulsory for installation. After installation you can change advance options.

STEP7:Customize your store

After the customization of URL, follows the step of customization of store configuration. It is very easy step. One can change three field as per the requirement and those fields are:=

  • Store Default Timezone

  • Store Default Currency

  • Store Default Language

The remaining can be skipped as default value and you can click Next button.

STEP8: Create Admin Account

The next step is to configure admin account. A form will appear on the screen. After filling the form, you can click Next button.

STEP9: Final Install

It is the final step after completing all the above steps. Click on “Install Now” button. After clicking the option, installation process get started and the progress bar will show the percentage of completion for installation. You will get screen showing success, after the installation is completed.

Click on the store URL to go to the store.

Magento Setup: A Guide to Move from Magento Go

Magento is the ecommerce software and platform which is trusted by the world’s leading brands. Developers love it since it’s open source, meaning one can customize the software according to their wish. Big businesses love it as it’s powerful, and they’ve got financial backup required for magento setup.

Usually for magento setup, global brands hire a team of developers to put an ecommerce store that fits their needs. Some of the leading brands include the North Face, Nike, Lindt, Sierra Nevada and Pentel.

Magento is not suitable for micro businesses. When you’re starting with minimum financial resources, one need a low-cost, creative solution, rather than a complex and expensive platform.
Magento Go was made by magento for catering to small business market. Without much expense, the Magento Connect App Store could be accessed using Magento Go.

Read also: Why Choose Magento For Your Responsive Site?

But due to its complication compared to other platforms, Magento Go store was deemed to be phased out by the company.

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But as a way out for existing users of Magento Go, the company had introduced couple of solutions – Zoey and Blugento (Specifically designed for German merchants.

Zoey

If you are a small business developer who knows the powerful magento platform, chances are that you want to have your ecommerce sore with the same platform. But magento setup is usually time consuming and complicated. Well, not anymore. Because Zoey is a Magento solution that can be set up within a day, even if you don’t have a developer to depend on.

Other benefits of a Zoey magento setup include:

Scalable

As your business grows to new heights, it becomes easier to scale your website’s capability as Zoey is a very flexible platform.

Awesome Customer Support

Coming from an already established team, the support for Zoey is simply amazing. None of your doubts will be left unanswered. There are a number of free tutorials and phone/email support.

Superb Product Catalog

You can add as many product attributes as you want, and features such as one-click mass changes make Zoey a delight to use.

Recommended read:What’s New and Cool in Magento 2?

Shopping Cart

There are numerous ways in which you can customize your Magento site’s payment methods when compared to other platforms.

Marketing Friendly

This affordable magento solution makes it further easier for you as a small business owner with its immense marketing support features. It will help you make the best out of SEO, email marketing, product reviews and other marketing techniques.

Affordable

The Magento Enterprise solution is a very costly affair for small business owners. But Magento’s Zoey setup comes in three simple plans that are very pocket-friendly/

If you want to know how to setup Zoey for your business, You can find all the required information here

Zoey Magento store offers a gamut of attractive features for small businesses. It has superb features for website design, shopping cart, store management, product management, Marketing & SEO, Analytics, Web hosting and more. Apart from these, there are features that makes Zoey Magento setup easy.

Blugento is a magento SAAS exclusively for German merchants. You can know more about it from their website

10 Awesome Magento Customization Tips

Magento is a flexible and extensible e-commerce platform that allow customers to optimize as well as customize their sites. It is a leading platform having more than 14000 stores which run either as magento enterprise, professional, go or magento community editions.

Conversion oriented interface of magento platform helps businesses to grow and helps to manage online stores better. Magento installation and configuration is easier but when it comes to customization it is rather difficult.

Here are the ten awesome magento customization tips:

1.Debugging Magento Store Layout

Magento provides powerful logging method in the controller. Enabling debug mode is easier and one just has to follow the code.

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2.Contact Form on Magento CMS Page

Contact form is given great importance for any e-commerce site. Contact form is the primary means of getting in touch with customers. Hence every magento store owner needs it working in the store. For better navigation, it is better to create a contact form using CMS page.

Read also:Why Choose Magento For Your Responsive Site?

3.Display category Name on Product Detail Pages
Magento store owners always keep product category name on the product detail page. This will be useful information to customers as they get details of where they are and what they are buying. There is certain codes that can be added to show product category name wherever you want within your layout.

4.If users are not logged in, hide product prices

One has to edit the following file for hiding product prices or to display tired pricing to logged in customers:

app/design/frontend/default/default/template/catalog/product/view/tierprices.phtml.

If the requirements are little complex we can use Magento Hide Prices, which is a comprehensive extension to hide price of products, add to cart button, disabling cart, displaying call for prices, or displaying inquiry forms etc

5.Remove credit card information from transactional emails

Magento store owners would never want to show their credit card information openly in transactional e-mails. Sending such information is highly insecure. One can remove displaying credit card information from transactional e-mails following the method:

Editapp/design/frontend/default/your_theme/template/payment/info/cc.phtml file

6.Add language pack

Magento is used as a multi-lingual store by all major brands. It is pretty easier to create a new store in Magento. There are several steps that should be followed to create a multi-lingual store in Magento.

7.Adding social media on Product Detail Pages

It is a good way to promote brand using social media. The like button in social medias like facebook, twitter, google+ etc can be helpful in the promotion of brands. Grab attention with social media.

Recommended read:What’s New and Cool in Magento 2?

8.Hide Empty Cart

It is futile to display cart in the sidebar if there is nothing in cart. Follow the steps to hide empty cart from sidebar:

Editapp/design/frontend/default//template/checkout/cart/sidebar.phtml file

9.Add custom comment box

Each product in the cart has option, add custom comment. While ordering, customers can enquire Instructions, requirements or specifications of the product in the comment box.

10. Custom Add to Cart button on CMS pages

Selling products via customized landing pages is not new; Marketers can do all sorts of efforts and thus can create pages to bring customers. With the CMS pages, customers can add certain products in the cart.Inorder to add products one have to follow certain codes and procedures.

Better Business for Better Future

All these ten tips can help in the customization of magento. It can be a difficult task for beginners involving magento front end customization.

Good Customization can be an added advantage to every ecommerce site especially a popular e-commerce site like magento.

Magento Marketplace to Arrive In Early 2016

New Magento Marketplace will be fully launched in early 2016.

It will be replacing Magento Connect.

Each extensions and providers in the marketplace will be reviewed by Magento. This review ensures that the right quality of products and services are offered by Magento Marketplace.

The extensions in the Magento app store will go through an automated basic check which will check for plagiarism, security including malware and viruses and Magento coding standards.

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According to Magento Revenue Share model, 70% of the revenue will be distributed to providers and 30% to Magento itself.

The only drawback is that Magento users will see less extensions available than previously under Magento Connect.

The good thing is that there is no fee to submit apps.

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Magento Commerce to Introduce New Platinum Level

Magento commerce, trusted by over 250,000 businesses worldwide develops deeper technology partnerships.

“These strategic changes to our technology partner program enable us to curate a set of best-of-breed partners and extensions that create great merchant experiences with the Magento platform,” said Mark Lenhard, SVP of Strategy and Growth at Magento Commerce. “We are committed to making strategic investments to develop the quality of our global ecosystem and to accelerate the sales momentum of qualified technology partners who are selling and supporting Magento Commerce solutions.”

Read also: Magento- No Longer an Ebay Company

“PayPal collaborates with leading technology partners like Magento to put exciting new products and features into the hands of customers that help millions of merchants and their shoppers more easily connect,” said Steve Fusco VP, GM North America Distribution, PayPal. “PayPal is honored to be named by Magento an inaugural platinum level partner. Together, PayPal and Magento have helped countless companies grow and prosper, and we look forward to working even more closely together in the years to come.”

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It recognizes segment leaders and provides for deeper collaboration in key categories of greatest interest to dealers.

“We have always striven to provide sophisticated functionality that delivers the best marketing ROI for retailers in a way that is entirely intuitive and easy to use. We are delighted that Magento has recognized these unique strengths and awarded us this prestigious global Platinum Partnership status”, said Simone Barratt, CEO of dotdigital.

This ensures a higher level of satisfaction and confidence with dealers and solution partners, while providing market differentiation for Magento technology partners and developers.

Source(s)

Magento- No Longer an Ebay Company

Magento, leading provider of open omni-channel innovation launched as a separate company, backed by Premira funds.

It boasts a strong portfolio of open-source and cloud-based omnichannel solutions

Magento, worldwide leader in eCommerce, powering more than 240,000 sites globally and supporting over $50 billion in gross products volume.

Read Also: Is Your Magento Website Slow? Speed It Up With These Tips

“Magento is at the forefront of a tremendous market opportunity. As an independent company, with the full support and global resources of the Permira funds, we are poised to accelerate our leadership as innovators, creating products that drive exceptional experiences across every stage of the commerce lifecycle”, said New CEO Mark Lavelle.

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“During our time as a division of eBay, Inc., we grew revenue fivefold, made significant investments in our core platform and added innovative mobile and omni-channel products. Now, we will build on this momentum–continuing to innovate with speed and at scale while we put renewed focus on expanding our market leadership with stronger emphasis on our global network of system integrators, technology partners and developer community”, he added.

Magento Marketplace is the largest commerce application marketplace providing merchants with a curated user experience in finding high quality products and services.

Is Your Magento Website Slow? Speed It Up With These Tips

With the usage and demand of Magento E-commerce websites increasing at a faster rate, speed of the website is also a major concern. Website’s speed allows your customers to have the best user experience possible while shopping in your ecommerce store. Many studies have found that most of the consumers will abandon a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

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Another important value for Magento Performance Optimization is for your Google Rank, which is adversely affected by any slowness with your site. Search engine giant, Google mainly spotlights on the website speed in ranking it higher on result pages. So the speed plays an essential part in driving more traffic towards your Magento E-commerce website with guaranteed conversions.

Read Also:Build Your Ecommerce Store with $1000 Using Magento

Along with choosing a reputable magento development company, for your magento E-commerce development, you should also consider certain tips to improve the performance of your website.

They are –

  • Reduce the number of ads – More number of ads to your e-commerce website makes it down so its application should be moderate and precise. Ads or advertisements are those things that pop up at the screen when you want to click, or even block the clicks you want to make, and it is usually used for advertising products or services of your own or others.
  • Use the recent version – The increasing lead of online stores is almost fully dependent on Magento development. Magento, the most popular E-commerce platform keeps on releasing its new version from time to time. Also each version of this E-commerce tool comes with improved functionality as well as features. So it is the need of the day to go for advanced version in order to get better speed and optimized performance.
  • Clear database logs frequently – Unnecessary data can make your Magento store run slowly. Clean up of the database is the right solution for optimal results. To increase the speed of Magento e-commerce site, you should clear the database logs quite often. Though not so easy, the task will definitely reduce loading time of the websites.
  • Periodic checking is crucial – As an e-commerce web merchant, it is important for you to always check the time that your page occupies. This will allow you to identify the source of the fault and make you fix it in time so that it will not pile up. For non-tech savvy merchants, it is recommended to take help from established magento development services.
  • Reduce the web pages size – Reducing the page size of the website is also an important technique in improving both speed and performance of e-commerce website running on Magento. The unit of measuring the web pages is bytes, the smallest metrics being kilobytes. One of the things that occupy bytes is images. Avoid the use of big images because they affect loading time greatly. Make sure to check and restrict the image size and number before uploading them. Keep in mind that the standard time that a shopping website must take to load is not more than two seconds.

Recommended Read:4 Popular Types of Magento Web Hosting

  • Reduce the use of third party tools – Even though Magento is a highly powerful and flexible E-commerce platform, it allows the developers to integrate third party tools or extensions easily. The reduction of these third party tools is also an important process of minimizing the delay and poor performance of your web page, as it will result to a large consumption of space resulting in generation of kilobytes and increasing the time spent to load your pages. The more kilobytes that your page consumes, the more time it spends to load and data consumes bytes.
  • Proper utilization of in-memory technology and caching – Utilization of in-memory technology and caching properly helps to avoid unnecessary access to database for optimal performance. This practice assists in evading needless approach to the database for finest performance. Enabling cache allows the system to retrieve previously accessed items easily, without having to reinvent-the-wheel every time.

Well experienced magento E-commerce services can provide online merchants with more advanced features to improve their E-commerce website’s performance.