Magento says its “the world’s most flexible platform.” It’s true! Magento’s enhanced accessibility features, extended community, and omni-channel experiences make it a giant in the eCommerce world.
But with great power comes great responsibility
If you are building your eCommerce store with Magento, you need to tread carefully. A meticulously customized Magento store can boost your brand value and increase your conversion ratio. On the other hand, if you are unfamiliar with the fundamentals of Magento development process, it can affect the sales of your e-Store. Hiring Magento Developers won’t be a bad option either.
Although 13% of online merchants use Magento, one can’t comment on its success rate without using it. Let’s take a look at the list of things novice developers should keep in mind while developing their eCommerce store on Magento.
Use of Default Settings
Homepage: A customer would be less inclined to browse through your e-Store if it’s titled just ‘Home’. As per SEO algorithm, you need to use a primary keyword and, if necessary, a secondary keyword for your home page title.
Descriptions: If you’re using default descriptions, your search engine rankings are highly affected which, eventually, leads to poor user experience. Product descriptions are a crucial part of your website. If you are blatantly copying them from other e-stores, Google identifies the irregularities and automatically decreases the search engine ranking of your store. Thus, your product descriptions need to be fresh and unique to attract customer’s attention.
Magento XML Sitemap: Sitemap helps you in increasing the ranking of your e-Store on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. While designing your Magento store, remember to add sitemap for better search engine ranking
Layered Navigation Issues
Layered Navigation allows you to browse through multiple options on a single page. If you are using this feature, you can face a lot of obstacles (overlapped categories, obscured images, and slow page response time). You can’t expect the visitor to wait for the page to load. To fix this issue, you can follow these steps:
Stop search engine crawlers to crawl via your pages
Use Ajax navigation to enable visitors to filter the product easily.
You can always embed Magento premium extensions such as Layered Navigation Pro to resolve this issue.
Bad Choice of Themes
Magento has plenty of beautiful themes designed to fit your e-Store of all shapes and sizes. If you select a theme which you think suits your e-Store best, you might be making a mistake. You need to look at it from the customer’s point of view and choose a theme which is easily navigable and makes your website more user-friendly. Follow the steps given below for better theme performance:
Always choose a simple theme. A heavy theme can slow your website loading time. A good website page should load within 20 microseconds.
Always choose a user-friendly theme. Always!
Unresponsive Site
Today, a responsive and clean website makes a good first impression. If it’s compatible on different devices and can be viewed on several browsers, your Magento store is packed and ready to go. On the other hand, an unresponsive website can affect the conversion ratio and prove to be detrimental for your brand. Ensure that you fall in the former category.
Shared Resources and Server
If you link your Magento store with other online stores and sites, it can reduce the loading speed and compromise the security of your website. Shared resourcing can largely affect the sales of your Magento store. To configure your website properly, select a server which is safe from hackers and spammers. MySQL and PHP5 are considered to be best options.
Your Magento store is a powerful platform. You should try to exploit it to the fullest. Taking advantage of its scalable administrative features, you can create a website which expresses your idea vividly. And if you ever face difficulty while developing your e-Store, you can always go to Magento’s forum and put your query there to get a speedy answer. The Magento community is a group of Magento consultants who volunteer to make Magento more accessible to the people around the world.