For observing sales growth and positive feedback, it is essential that your eCommerce store operates efficiently without error. The smallest problem needs to be constantly monitored and managed with Magento, as it is such a complex platform—it’s keeping a lot of plates spinning at a given time, and any of them could set off a chain reaction. A poorly-maintained Magento store can have large financial consequences; a single bad day can hugely affect sales for that day and compromise the security of your eStore. From identity theft to a loss of leads, a range of things can happen if you lack a strong Magento development team taking care of maintenance.
The Magento marketplace has several third-party extensions for adding extra features to your eStore. This extensions may involve: coupon management, integrating multiple payment gateways, and adding security seals. However, there are also certain practices that should be followed when integrating third-party extensions into a Magento store that can help reduce the number of bugs as well as enhance the quality and lifespan of your extensions. Below I will break down best practice to avoid in Magento development and help you resolve common issues Magento users experience.
- Establishing Coding Standards
It is necessary for an eCommerce store to follow coding standards. With Magento it’s strongly recommended that core files are not edited as it can break predefined Magento behaviour and leave your store vulnerable. There will be times when your project requires a fast turnaround time that makes developers lose focus and break coding standards. This gets the job done faster but tends to be low-quality and will leave your store vulnerable to malicious actors and bugs in the long run. Therefore, by following coding conventions, you keep your store safe, professional and all coding comments and documentation easy to read.
- Writing Reusable Codes
Code reusability can be difficult to maintain and therefore any copy and pasting needs to be managed carefully throughout development. Writing code or creating a single class that you can refer to when needed is a better way to create reusability, and time-efficient development. While the class could be small, it needs to stay focused on providing a general solution which can be reused in the future.
- Magento 2.0 Upgrade
One of the first maintenance and support practices you need to implement is for your Magento website to be updated to its latest version in order to give your website the best possible protection. According to Symantec, more than $19.4 billion dollars and 20 hours of reparation per victim was spent by U.S entrepreneurs dealing with cyber attacks in 2017.
Upgrading to the latest version of Magento increases your protection as well as providing the following benefits:
- Improved performance and scalability
- Improved checkout process
- Mobile friendliness
- Ease of upgrade (plugins, extensions)
- Instant purchasing
- Email marketing automation
- Advanced reporting for business intelligence
- Choosing a reliable hosting service
With a reliable hosting service, your Magento website is on a good path to be a high-performing website. You should choose your hosting services according to the system requirements of your Magento version, the size of your store and the amount of traffic you expect; when any of these factors increase, you should upgrade your hosting plan. A good hosting plan allows you both the length and breadth for future growth.
Many eStore owners make the mistake of looking for free or inexpensive hosting for Magento, which often leads to a poor user experiences and security problems. Magento is a heavy-duty platform, and needs appropriate hosting.
5. Backing up Data and Securing the Server
A regular backup policy to ensure the maintenance of sensitive information should be put in place. Valuable data needs to be properly taken care of with a single click and safely stored in an external location. As you keep working on your Magento server, make sure that there is no unnecessary software that is running in the background. There are also several other things that you need to take care of with your eStore like:
- Using secured communication protocols like HTTPS and SSH to manage files
- Remove root access to your server
- Ensure that passwords are kept strong and changed during regular intervals
- Make sure admin logins have hard-to-guess names (read: don’t leave it as “admin”)
- Cache Configuration
To better the performance of your store, it’s highly recommended you configure the cache by selecting Varnish as your web accelerator. This is a reverse HTTP proxy and will significantly optimize the speed of your eStore. Since this proxy can boost the speed of your Magento store, you can also leverage browser caching when a user visits the page for the first time.
- Overriding Observers
Since observers are used to catch the action which was triggered by the event, they can enhance the behaviour of your Magento application. Poorly-designed observers can lead to issues, instability and even the complete breakdown of your store or application. To save you from such situations, here are some guidelines that you need to keep in mind before an observer is executed:
- Keep your observer efficient
Always try to keep your observer small and efficient by avoiding complex logic. This is important when your observer is listening to an event which is frequently dispatched, where having complex computations in your observer can lead to slowing down of your app’s processes.
- Keep business logic away
The observer that you are using should not contain any logic other than that which is needed for it to run efficiently. Always keep your business logic encapsulated in other classes which your observer is using.
- Declare your observer in the required scope
Always make your observer specific. This could mean that if your observer is only limited to frontend developments, you can declare your observer in the /etc/frontend/events.xml file instead of the global /etc/events.xml file.
- Avoid cyclical event loops
The cyclical event loop refers to the process in which your observer calls the method of an object, which sets off an event and triggers a chain reaction of events, ultimately leading to the dispatching of the same initial event which executes your observer in an endless, recurring manner. To avoid falling into such loops, you need to ensure that your observer is not dispatching any event that immediately listens (or will listen to) the chain of events that follows.
- Do not let your observer rely on invocation order
Observers listening to the same event may be invoked in any order, as the event is dispatched. Therefore, don’t let your observers make any assumptions about the order in which it would be invoked or rely on the execution of another observer.
The Bottom Line
Since Magento is one of the top eCommerce platforms when it comes to online retailing, here are some of our suggestions that can deliver effective and custom-made Magento stores with ease:
- Inchoo
Founded in 2008 at Osijek, Croatia, Inchoo is a full-service eCommerce development agency. Over the past decade they have served over 150 clients and 450 Magento projects.
CodeClouds are a Magento website development company that has achieved global success through specialized eCommerce services. Their work portfolio shows an abundance of eCommerce projects specialized for a range of different industries. They have produced an impressive amount of Magento 1 & Magento 2 stores for B2B and B2C businesses.
These are our recommendations for Magento development agencies that we found have the perfect balance of technology and innovation in its place to help your eCommerce store build a strong base.
When hiring a development team for your Magento store. It’s important you not only explain your project vision but understand how to best work with a development team. To achieve this, read this article describing the best way to manage developer productivity.
