Statistically, “Magento 2 has a 0.9% market share of all websites that use a known content management system. Magento is downloaded nearly 5000 times every day”.
Of all the popular eCommerce platforms in the world, Magento 2 is the most popular one, preferred by most eCommerce developers. Characterised by open-source code, easy customisation, and flexibility, Magento 2 is a fully owned subsidiary of Adobe Inc., backed by a robust Magento developers community and extensive support. Upgrading Magento 1 to Magento 2 proved to be wondrous for eCommerce merchants, allowing them to optimise their stores for mobile devices, performance, and SEO. Magento 2 has laid the foundation for several online stores, including some of the renowned brands.
In this blog, we have enlisted some of the easy steps for Magento development.
Magento Development in 5 Steps
- Developer Mode: Magento 2 comes in ‘default mode’ and when the store is live, it runs in the ‘production mode’. But there’s also a special ‘developer mode’ in Magento 2 that allows users to add modules and customise the code in ‘production mode’. However, if there are bugs and errors in the code, you won’t get notified before it’s too late.
There are several benefits of using the ‘developer mode’ that Magento 2 offers:
- Reporting: The developer mode maintains a log in the report directory that documents every action taken during the Magento Web Decelopment and customisation process. In case any problem arises, you can easily retrace your steps and troubleshoot. Better record-keeping is beneficial for the quality assurance process which is essential for regulatory compliance.
- Static File Displayed but Not Cached: When in ‘developer mode’, even though the static file gets written into the static directory, it is not stored in the site cache. This displays the static file on the front-end server immediately. As a result, you get notified of any error instantly.
- Exception Errors: These errors appear in the browser immediately instead of being logged. Also, it gives a real-time video of how making changes might impact the user experience so that you can rectify the problem beforehand.
Other than these advantages there’s a huge disadvantage of the ‘developer mode’ which is, performance. All these functions impact your website’s performance, increasing the loading and running time. Performance impacts user behaviour; bounce and site abandonment rates increase every second. This means you would have to resume ‘production mode’ before your site goes live to users as this mode offers the best possible performance of the three modes. The ‘development mode enhances the coding experience and points out issues before they have a chance to derail the user experience for any given customer or an entire mass. Ensure that you use ‘developer mode’ while making changes and customisations to the Magento 2 source code, or when you code and add a custom module.
- Varnish Caching: Including varnish is one of the key enhancements to Magento 2’s tech stack. Varnish is a free, open-source HTTP accelerator that enhances the performance of dynamic and data-heavy websites. It creates a virtual memory space for data that has to be stored, allowing the operating system to decide the data that would get stored in memory and the one that gets sent to disk. The operating system starts caching data as it moves to the disk without this extra layer. The Varnish virtual memory space is placed between Magento 2 online store and the server and the cacheable data is stored in the Varnish virtual memory space. Varnish can speed up data delivery immensely by minimising the caching burden produced by the site. This makes a big difference during user engagement and bounce-back rates.
Varnish not only adds to Magento 2’s tech stack but also is quite powerful. You can also optimise your online store’s performance by:
- Optimising Images: Usually, Magento 2 sites are image-heavy and can slow down your website. So, you can simply compress all images and select the correct image type for the right use.
- Choosing the Right Theme: Some themes load faster than others. A clean and lightweight theme impacts the site’s performance positively.
- Use a Content Delivery Network: You can locate your shared server functions that are geographically closer to you using a content delivery network (CDN).
- Use Flat Cataloguing: If you wish to speed up your website significantly, turn on the flat catalogues and products option from your admin panel.
- Use a Dedicated Server or VPS: For a sturdy Magento 2 online store, opt for a dedicated server instead of a shared server.
- Extensions: Using extensions, you can customise your Magento 2 website without the extra cost and burden of custom coding. These extensions are embedded discretely within the website’s architecture. Magento 2 developers have several third-party extensions to explore. Even though Magento 2 eCommerce sites are easy to customise, extraneous extensions are mostly responsible when a well-optimised website starts getting bogged down due to poor performance.
- SEO: Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most powerful tools of digital marketing, allowing your store to be easily located by new customers searching for products in search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Both performance and mobile-friendliness are two essential components of SEO as they can detect your website’s performance and mobile optimisation and will rank your website accordingly. There are other aspects of SEO such as back-linking, directory listings, and local map optimisation. At the same time, several aspects of SEO happen on the website in the form of on-page and technical optimisation. Extensions play a significant role in adding user-friendly features and also in optimising your Magento 2 website for SEO performance. There are individual extensions that perform individual SEO functions. At the same time, there are extensions that offer an all-in-one solution for Magento 2 website SEO.
The features that extensions perform include:
- Mask Task Implementation
- Sitemaps and Layered Navigation
- Meta Tag Templates
- Rich Snippets
- Page Analysis
- Advanced Tagging
- Custom Widgets: Widgets, for example, catalogue category links, new product lists, recently viewed products, orders, and returns, etc., add either static or dynamic content to an online store. Magento 2 offers several standard widgets. Using a custom widget, you can get the display of content right. These are mostly an extension with advanced parameter options. Therefore, you need to keep the widget lean and test it extensively to see how it will impact the website’s performance.
Read More: Frontend Themes for Magento 2 Developers: How to Choose the Right One?
Wrapping Up,
Magento 2 is inarguably your go-to option if you wish to own a one–of–a–kind eCommerce store. Referring to the aforementioned points, it can be concluded that using the latest version of Magento can provide you with a fast and efficient store.
Of course, migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 can be a daunting process for which you might need to get in touch with either an individual Magento developer or a recognised company.
If you are looking for the best Magento development company in Australia, 18th Digitech is the answer to your search. We are an award-winning company and Adobe Gold Solution Partner with a reputation for successfully catering to renowned brands in Australia and across the globe. Get in touch with us for a personalised walk-through of our services.
