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Magento is one of the world’s most popular eCommerce platforms. It’s estimated to power a third of all e-commerce websites on the internet. Magento is great for both web developers and business owners as an open source system with built-in e-commerce tools and fantastic official support.

Magento 1 has been continuously updated and upgraded over the years, with numerous patches and updates. These updates have enabled website owners to keep their version of the software up to date with the latest functionality whilst maintaining a secure site.

In November 2015, Magento 2 was released as an upgraded Magento platform with some major changes and fantastic new features.

What makes Magento 2 different?

Magento 2 isn’t just an upgrade: it’s a completely new piece of software. Think of it as a rebuild of the entire Magento platform from the ground up. If you want to find out more about new M2 features, we’ve already written about the differences between Magento 1 and 2

This means that moving to Magento 2 involves a complete website rebuild, which isn’t as straightforward as applying a patch or an upgrade.

When will support for Magento 1 end?

After announcing the release of version 2, Magento announced that support for version 1 would be ending. This allows Magento developers to focus on developing the new version of Magento, ensuring that it offers the best possible functionality, new features and security.

Initially, Magento provided a cut-off date of November 2018. Every store running on Magento 1 would need to have been upgraded by November 2018.

This was the original date at which Magento would stop releasing security updates. Merchants with a v.1 Magento site would be left susceptible to hacking and security breaches.

The announcement of this cut-off date created panic in the Magento community, as suddenly Magento developers were in short supply.

Magento finally acknowledged that this was an impossible task for Magento developers and website owners, as there simply weren’t enough Magento developers to cope with building the number of sites required within the original timeframe.

Thankfully, Magento decided the original the cut-off date was to be abandoned.

As long as version 1 security updates are applied as they are received, your site will remain secure and up-to-date for the time being.

Whilst this is reassuring for site owners who are yet to upgrade to Magento 2, it’s important to remember that this is just an extension of the deadline and that the end of support for Magento 1 sites is fast approaching.

Latest Magento Update

Magento announced in September that the cut-off date for Magento 1 support will be June 2020.

Magento will not support Enterprise or Community Edition customers after this deadline. The only support will be unofficial support from within the Magento community. This would leave any Magento 1 site owner vulnerable, therefore we urge all Magento 1 merchants who haven’t moved over yet to do so now.

If you are the owner of a Magento 1 site and are reading this, you should seriously think about upgrading to Magento 2 ASAP.

What steps should your business be taking now?

The upgrade process isn’t simple and could take a few months to complete, even for the simplest sites. It’s important to have a plan of action now to ease your transition. It’s also important to make sure that upgrading to Magento 2 doesn’t affect your site’s SEO, which could lead to a drop in traffic and sales. Setting your Magento 2 website up for good SEO is very important and needs to be done with a full understanding of how your specific site is set up. It also needs to be done before your new site goes live or you will likely be causing significant crawl problems and your websites ongoing SEO will suffer.

Our skilled Magento developers and digital marketing team are well equipped to deal with any e-commerce transition over to Magento 2. We aim to support our clients throughout this transition, ensuring that everything runs smoothly throughout the process. We especially focus on your SEO, researching all your current rankings and popular pages to ensure your rankings are moving over with your new site in a structured and planned way.

There is high demand for Magento developers right now, so it’s vital to book your slot before it’s too late!

Need some advice from Magento experts?

Web-Feet is a full-service digital agency based near Southampton in Hampshire, UK. We specialise in e-commerce website development, with an in-house team of experienced Magento developers. We are also specialists in data-driven SEO with a focus on actionable data and strategies.

If you’d like any further advice on upgrading from Magento 1 to Magento 2, feel free to get in touch.

Improve your Click Through Rate (CTR)

What are the best SEO tips for Magento 2? This is a big chicken and egg – let me explain why. A higher CTR will improve your rankings but obviously, you need higher rankings to get clicks. This means that you need to be thinking about your CTR from the outset which is why I’ve listed this section first.

Put yourself in your customers shoes

Everything you do with regard to your website has a direct impact on your CTR. You need to be thinking from the mindset of a customer from the outset. Hopefully, you did this when you built your website in the first place but if not, now’s the time to revisit this. You’ll hear the term ‘reducing friction’ a lot with regard to product or service.

This is where small things count so pay attention to the detail and remov anything that is ‘annoying’ as you work through the customer experience. Check things like navigation, site search, shopping cart process, contact forms – basically any user interaction. Check everything flows smoothly and the user intent can be easily satisfied.

Website Design

Ecommerce sites need to both look good and be as friction-free as possible. Clearly, there are multiple factors to consider when thinking about how to convert visitors to paying customers. Having an old and dated website is going to put a lot of potential customers off and also makes your products and services more sensitive to price.

If your site looks cheap and cheerful but you are charging premium prices your conversions are going to be terrible.

The other essential part of web design for eCommerce and good SEO is how your site looks on the many and varied browsing devices in use. Check your website regularly on as many different devices as possible. I say regularly because you are likely to be making regular changes to your website and sometimes things break unexpectedly.

UI/UX

I’ve touched on this above with regard to the user journey. This is essentially what User Interface (UI) and User eXperience (UX) is all about. It’s the experience that the user has when they are taking their journey through your website. This is often overlooked and irritating barriers can be put in the way of converting visitors to paying customers.

It is always advisable to have proper user testing carried out on your website but if this is outside of your budget, ask friends, workers or family to help out. Get them to use different devices too and give you some honest feedback regarding their experience. Dividing up the workload can help too so you can have different people checking different parts of the website.

A great example of great UI/UX is the Stripe online payment service. The entire process of entering your card information doesn’t even require you to use a mouse or tab key. It moves you along the entire process seamlessly as you enter your details. This is one of the key reasons they have become so popular in a market previously dominated by much bigger players.

HTML Sitemap

An HTML sitemap is an important SEO ranking factor primarily because it improves the user experience. Magento does not support an HTML sitemap out of the box so you will need an extension for this. The example (image) HTML Sitemap Extension for Magento by Amasty above is one example of a Magento extension that allows you to add an HTML sitemap to a Magento eCommerce site. BSS Commerce also offers a Dynamic HTML Sitemap extension for Magento.

Magento Page Titles and Meta Descriptions

Magento does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to generating page titles dynamically from your product information. This applies to the product pages, but for all other pages, it pays to better optimise. The best SEO for Magento, or indeed any website, involves research. Find out which of your competitor sites are ranking better than you (for your chosen product or keyword) and dig into their page titles and meta descriptions.

The sort of questions you should be asking yourself are:

Are theirs more engaging than yours?

Are theirs providing more relevant information?

Do this research for your home page, category pages and landing pages. It will take some time but this hard work will pay off with better rankings. There are many tools to help with this but Google itself can give you a lot of information from their existing search tools.

Canonical URL’s

I’m not going to get too far into the technical or configuration aspects of this but will link to a great article on these aspects in the Technical SEO for Magento 2 section below. When you have pages on your website that are duplicates for product variants then you need to use canonical url’s. Magento config settings cater for this but you need to make sure these are set up properly. Basically, this is just telling the Google search bot that one page is the main or primary page and the others are secondary and shouldn’t be indexed.

Speed Optimisation

For the best Magento 2 SEO setup, you want your site to be as fast as possible. Magento has some built-in options around caching, but there is a lot to be said for using services available from the likes of Cloudflare. This will allow you to optimise code and images using content delivery networks. This will make your site much faster in many ways and improve the user experience overall.

Technical SEO for Magento 2

It’s not my intention to cover all the technical SEO aspects of SEO for Magento as that’s an entire topic in its own right. It’s a highly configurable solution but it also has a few things that can be frustrating to set up and configure optimally.

Like all things SEO however, it’s all about attention to detail. There is an excellent article, The Definitive Guide to Magento SEO that covers all these technical aspects. Many of the points covered in this article will need developer time but they are also very important to understand and adopt if you want to get the Best Magento SEO setup for your eCommerce website.

Getting the best out of your website takes time and effort and I hope that this article helps with that process. As always, I hope you found this article useful and welcome comments, feedback and questions as always. Happy SEOing.

Introduction to Magento 2 Search

Magento 2 search can sometimes be suboptimal when more than one search term is used. Your initial reaction might be that the search engine isn’t very good. However, using data collected from the Magento 2 admin and using some experience, the platform offers some great flexibility to customise and therefore optimise search results. The end result can be a much better user experience for your site visitors and hopefully a better conversion rate. To find out more, read on.

Considerations

Before we dive in, there are some key considerations before you start trying to customise your search within M2.

Understanding user behaviour

Offsite search

First, we need to take a step back from the M2 website under consideration and look at how the visitors arrive at your website in the first place. If you are using Paid Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation for organic search, then the ‘searching’ has most likely been done BEFORE the visitor arrives at your website. Hopefully, they’ve landed on the right page to meet their needs. In other words, these users are arriving at the website on the product page they are looking for. As such, Magento search is less critical to this type of user. What is critical is ensuring you have a good Digital Marketing strategy to ensure these potential buyers are finding your products through search and landing right where they need to in order to purchase.

Onsite search

Everyone else that lands on your site, through more generic search terms or through your efforts to promote your business and products/services, may be better considered a ‘browser’. They land on your site because they are interested in what you have to offer but might not have a specific product or service in mind. This is the main target audience for optimising your on-site Magento search terms.

We’ll get into a specific example shortly. For now, I’ll show you how to find where you customise search terms in the site admin. So, when you are logged into your M2 admin, click on the Marketing tab and then under SEO & Search you will see ‘Search Terms’ – as highlighted in the image below. Select this option and it will take you through to the Search Terms page.

The Search Terms page in the Magento 2 admin

When you select the option above it will open the Search Terms page, as shown below.

The purpose of this page is two-fold. First of all, it’s where all your user intelligence is to be found in terms of what people have searched for on your website. This is actual, real-world data and therefore a potential gold mine in terms of understanding users search behaviour. This page will show you the most recent search queries, how many results that query received and how many times it’s been used. You can filter the data by Uses so that the most frequently used search terms are shown at the top. Not only can you see popular search terms you can also see mis-spellings and other such data which you can use to provide a better visitor experience. There are two key opportunities here;

Mis-spellings

Within the search queries used, you may find things like common mis-spellings or people searching using singular (eg. fridge) when your products are only listed in their plural form (e.g. fridges), and vice versa. This is your opportunity to catch these and redirect them to the actual search results (products) they were looking for rather than no results which can be frustrating and result in visitors leaving your website.

Products or Brands you don’t stock

If visitors are searching for products or brands you don’t carry, rather than give them zero results in the search, redirect them to a Magento landing page that can offer them alternatives. This would be like going the extra mile if you were face to face with the customer. It shows understanding, great customer service and may result in a sale when otherwise the visitor would have just moved on.

Creating Your Custom Search

Here’s an example below of how the search term ‘black fridge’ returns unexpected results. Because we have two words in the search, Magento treats these as mutually exclusive. So, in this case, ‘black’ is being weighted higher than ‘fridge’. So items in the database that are ‘black’ are being listed above those that are ‘fridges’, the search terms are not being used collectively because that’s not how the search works in Magento. This makes sense if you think about it but also, Magento has provided loads of customisation options, which is the purpose of this blog post of course. It should also be noted that you can also ‘weight’ product attributes in Magento in order to optimise search too – that however is outside of the scope of this article.

To deliver better results for this search term we can set up a custom search term within the M2 admin. More on this below.

Having determined that this search terms doesn’t work as we’d like it to, we can add this as a search term in the admin as described. In order to do this, we need to determine a destination URL so that we can effectively override the search and direct that specific term to a specific page. Below I’ve selected the ‘Fridges’ category from the main site navigation. Then I’ve used the search filter on the left to select just the black fridges. This sends me to the page URL as shown below. Copy this URL to your clipboard and then we will use it to set up our custom search.

If you now go back to the site admin you can create a New Search, this will display the following information. All we need to do is add the search query (in this case black fridge), select the Store View we want this search to apply to, and then add the redirect URL which we copied above. Click save. Please note that if the search query already exists in the database you will need to search for this on this page and then edit it – this only applies if you get a message to say that your search term already exists. As mentioned above, you can also set up a custom search for products or brands that you don’t carry. So if there’s a brand you don’t carry but you have some great alternatives – redirect that search term to a Magento landing page suggesting alternatives. You may make a sale when otherwise the visitor is just going to leave and go somewhere else. It’s also a great opportunity to share your knowledge with your visitors because you may have a much better alternative, this is your opportunity to say why.

If you now go back to the main website and carry out the same search as before, you will get the results as shown below. Perfect!

Search Synonyms

Search synonyms in Magento 2 is another way to customise search. This is a way to link related search terms but only applies to single words. If you have a single word search term that is commonly misspelt, you can link these by creating a Synonym. You do this by creating a list of words, separated by commas. When anyone searches for any of these words, they will all be linked to the same search results. These are especially useful for single search terms that can be misspelt. For anything else, there are the custom search options above.

How to Video

Here’s a video with a step by step guide that shows you how to do everything I’ve talked about above.

In summary

Successful websites are as much about the experience as they are your products and services. You want to get your visitors to what they want quickly and with as little friction as possible. This is why Magento 2 has these really useful features that allow you to fine-tune your visitors’ search experience. Now you know how this works it’s well worth spending time regularly, fine-tuning this part of your website.

Magento 1 vs Magento 2

Magento 2 is the latest version of the most popular ecommerce platform in the world. Currently holding 14% of the market share for ecommerce platforms, it’s safe to say the Magento upgrade has been a pretty big deal for ecommerce businesses.

The key defining feature of Magento 1 is it’s flexibility. Users can create stores with a variety of functions using pre-made extensions or by utilising the coding skills of their developers. This flexibility leads to a better shopping experience, with plenty of useful features and innovation opportunities for both B2B and B2C businesses. This is one of the key reasons why Magento is so popular.

However, despite this flexibility, Magento 1 is not the most user-friendly platform. It lacks performance optimisation, mobile-responsiveness, and some admin capabilities that every online store needs. These essential features aren’t part of the Magento 1 package and would need to be developed by a skilled Magento developer. There have also been many complaints of Magento 1 running slow, which isn’t ideal for an ecommerce site.

To address these issues, the Magento team designed an upgraded platform: Magento 2.

Magento 2 comes with features that make it a better platform overall. The major changes for Magento 2 include the following:

Improved UX

The admin panel of Magento 1 is notoriously difficult to navigate and not user friendly. Thankfully, the team at Magento decided to address this issue head on with Magento 2.

One of the most obvious changes and welcomed to the second edition of Magento is its brand new admin panel. The new admin interface is designed to help reduce the time managing the online store. It’s a lot more user-friendly and easier to get to grips with.

Magento 2’s administrative improvements and new capabilities include:

1. Improved product creation: The new step-by-step product creation tools allow you to add products to your store up to 4 times faster than in Magento 1.
2. Improved data view and filtering: Admin are able to customise the new grid-style admin panel so important business information can be accessed quickly. The personalised admin panel is designed to increase productivity when managing products, orders, and customer data. This means you are welcomed with a clean, de-cluttered user interface that offers the information you need. Magento has also added the ability to quickly filter data based on any of the attributes that have been enabled in your data view.
3. Admin navigation improvements: Overall the admin interface is cleaner and less cluttered. Menus are more organised so that finding the page and functionality that you are seeking is much simpler. These improvements lead to a smaller learning curve and quicker productivity for administrators.
4. Data safeguards: Magento 1 was designed for a single user admin to be manipulating product data at a single time. This is troublesome for larger sites that might have multiple administrators to work on product data simultaneously, thus making your team more efficient and allowing you to more easily keep your store’s products up to date. Magento have addressed this issue with Magento 2.
5. Product videos: Adding videos from YouTube or Vimeo is now very simple and supported by Magento 2. This offers a great opportunity to properly merchandise your products and add some engaging video content to your site.

The admin interface of Magento 2 also now includes drag-and-drop layout editing, meaning users don’t need extensive coding knowledge to modify an online store’s appearance. This means you can create a beautiful online store in half the time.

Streamlined checkout

The majority of Magento 1 stores had to alter the checkout process in some way to make it more user-friendly. Now, better checkout options are built into Magento 2. This means every store built with Magento 2 will by default have a more intuitive checkout process.

The checkout process in Magento 2 is more streamlined, making it quicker and easier for customers to go from adding items to their cart to completing an order. It’s highly customisable and requires fewer complicated steps and customer information. Reducing the checkout time is huge for reducing abandoned carts and increasing conversions, so this is a great improvement for both customers and business owners.

Magento have also simplified customer registration by allowing customers to create an account after ordering instead of during the checkout process. When a customer goes to checkout, they are brought to a default guest checkout screen where they enter an email address. If this matches an existing customer, they are given an option to checkout faster with saved information. Guests can create an account in one click from the order Thank You page. These features which simplify the order process encourage customers to return to your site and make purchases. Fewer confusing choices and fewer forms means a significant increase in conversions as customers focus on what matters: finishing the checkout process.

The new checkout also includes order details on every step, offering greater transparency to help put your customers at ease. The order summary in Magento 2 now includes product photos. This reduces ordering errors which cuts down on returns and increases buyer confidence that leads to higher conversions.

More mobile-friendly

As more and more customers are shopping on smartphones and tablets, mobile responsiveness is key to improving sales. In fact, 50% of online transactions are now performed on mobile devices. The Magento team recognised this and made mobile responsiveness a priority for Magento 2.

Magento 2 comes with new responsively designed and SEO-friendly themes, integrated video features and a streamlined checkout. These all improve the look and function of Magento stores on mobile devices, thus encouraging mobile sales. A much more streamlined, mobile-friendly checkout and faster performance will result in a much higher conversion rate for your mobile shoppers.

The new admin panel is also responsive and touch-screen friendly so you can manage your store on the go. This enhancement ensures easier control and configuration of the online store. This is great for merchants who work with their CMS via iPads or tablets – make changes in the office, on the train or at home.

Performance enhancement

Magento 2 was designed with performance in mind. The developers behind Magento have achieved this through utilising the following technical improvements:

1. Ajax cart: Magento 2 uses JavaScript to add items to the shoppers cart without reloading the entire page, putting less load on your hosting hardware resulting in a more responsive experience and a faster checkout time for your shoppers.
2. Cache: Magento 2’s improved caching system stores commonly accessed page elements to serve them faster to your visitors, and now includes support for caching technologies like Varnish (a popular HTTP accelerator).
3. PHP 7: PHP is the programming language that Magento is built with. Magento 2 is optimised for PHP 7, which provides superior performance to previous PHP versions.
4. Hosting environment improvements: Magento 2 includes new features and functionality that allows you to more easily spread the demand on your hosting infrastructure over multiple servers, which makes handling large traffic spikes much easier.

Magento 2 will run an average of 30% to 50% faster than it’s predecessor. Faster site speed encourages more user interaction with your site and more products added to your site’s cart, leading to more sales and fewer abandoned carts.

The latest Magento version can handle up to 39% more orders per hours with 66% faster add-to-cart times that Magento 1. It can also better handle many catalogue pages without slowing down, with a nearly instant server response time for catalogue browsing.

Magento 2’s improved functionality also means it can handle more traffic. Magento 2 can manage 10 million page views an hour, whereas Magento 1 can only process 200,000. This makes it ideal for large stores and able to grow with an online business.

In addition to all of these fantastic new features, updates within Magento 2 are designed to work a lot quicker, making it easy for Magento users to take advantage of new features as they’re released.

Key payment integrations

As we’ve mentioned, Magento 2 integrates a lot of popular extensions so stores have better functionality out of the box. This includes payment gateways like PayPal and Braintree. These are payment platforms the majority of Magento users choose to integrate anyway, so having them already integrated into Magento 2 makes it a lot easier for store owners.

Magento 2’s integration with PayPal means customers do not need to re-enter payment information such as a billing address as this is handled by PayPal, another development which makes the checkout process smoother and quicker.

There are also integrations with Worldpay and Cybersource to increase payment security, so customers can rest assured that their payments are safe and secure.

So, Magento 2 – have you been persuaded to transition?

Web-Feet have certified Magento developers who are eager and ready to help ease this transition. Let us help give your customers the benefit of Magento 2’s new features.

Although some have reservations about moving to Magento 2, it’s clear this platform was designed to provide a better experience for both customers, store owners and administrators. It maintains the flexibility Magento is known for, but with improved features.

What’s more, soon Magento 1 security updates will be stopping, so all Magento ecommerce site owners will have to move over to Magento 2 sooner or later.

If you’re thinking about moving your ecommerce site over to Magento 2, or creating one from scratch our team of expert Magento developers are here to help.

Contact Us

Google is implementing a series of changes to Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, to try and make the web a safer place. Starting in January 2017, Chrome will display a warning when a page isn’t protected by an SSL Certificate. Further down the line, Google plans to show this warning for all HTTP pages.

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What is it?

Apple Pay for eCommerce websites is here. This month sees the release of macOS Sierra and iOS 10, bringing with it many new features. The most interesting, in our opinion, being the availability of Apple Pay on the web. This opens an interesting new dimension to online shopping and eCommerce. Customers can now order items with the touch of a button by using Touch ID on their iPhone, iPad or Apple Watch. This presents a great opportunity for shop owners that use an eCommerce platform.

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If you’re running CactuShop to manage your online eCommerce experience, it’s probably about time you started looking at your options, not least because you’re site is probably more than 3 years old (which is in general the lifespan of any website’s design) but also because the technology behind your site is now, well it’s old and is not future proof. Which is why over the past year and a half or so we have been building new sites and converting customers with CatuShop sites to the Magento Community Edition platform. CactuShop has served Web Feet and many of our customers incredibly well over the years but it is time to move on and Magento is the most popular, extendable and feature rich eCommerce platform out there boasting excellent security, constant upgrades and hundreds of thousands of merchant users.

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You may have seen the news that Magento Go is being discontinued as a service as of Feb 1, 2015 (https://go.magento.co.uk/). If you are a current Magento Go customer and are looking at your options then you’ll probably be looking around to see what your options are. We at Web Feet can help, even if you would just like some consultation on the next steps, give us a call and we’ll see what we can do to help. Alternatively you may want someone to manage the entire migration of your existing Magento Go Store to Magento Community edition (presuming you want to stay using the Magento Ecosystem) and somewhere to host it.

Either way (or if you’re somewhere in between) then give us a call or contact us (https://www.web-feet.co.uk/contact) to find out how we can help give you peace of mind during this transition.

One of our clients approached us to build a way that they could manage hreflangs on their Magento stores where they were looking to have multiple language versions of the site with different pages on each site. I looked at a few options online and there were some that worked provided the sites would be identical in terms of content but none that would enable control of where the links would go if there wasn’t an alternative url.

… so I built a plugin that enables our client to upload their urls in a csv with the base site in the first column and then they can add as many columns after that to upload the urls for the other language sites. The plugin then retrieves any alternate urls for any other site from the data and adds them to the <head> section of the website.

If this is a solution you think you would require for your multi language Magento, then please don’t hesitate to contact us at info@web-feet.co.uk.

The new Magister Militum site has been updated onto an eCommerce Magento platform!

Magister Militum specialise in war figurines from pre historic soldiers to modern aircrafts, they have it all. Check out their website if you’re interested.

The Magister Militum site features multiple customisation features and plug-ins, including a search bar and filters to narrow down the products. The site is built on the Magento eCommerce platform; great for sites with a large number of products – making it easier to add and update content. Another component we have added is the Owebia Shipping extension; allowing for more accurate shipping rates, you can set any variable such as destination, weight, price and apply different shipping methods. Also added is a customised invoice and shipment pdf generator specific to Magister Militum’s requirements. The new layered navigation feature, built in-house to replace a dysfunctional plugin, allows you to narrow down your search query quickly and without the whole page re-loading. A custom events module was also added to Magento to display upcoming tradeshows.

The Magento Magister Militum site now has many more features making the overall site experience much better. Please tell us what you think, or contact us if you require something similar.