Archive for the ‘Magento’ Category
90% of my Traffic is Lightspeed fast, but I need more!
Monday, August 9th, 2010Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
What’s going on?
First, understand from a high-level that Lightspeed caches entire pages. It’s like taking a picture of a group at a family reunion. Instead of having to get the family back together every time you want to show that particular page (or see that group of people), you just bring up the photo you took. With Lightspeed, instead of loading PHP, running through Magento, and making DB calls to generate a page, Apache simply returns the static HTML generated for that page when it was first cached (Or that picture was taken). This means much faster page loads and much less work for Apache/PHP (or whatever web server setup you use).
For typical Magento installations, a small portion of your traffic requires you to change something (like adding cousin Larry to the picture), which can require getting the whole gang back together (PHP/Magento/MySQL). In the case of Magento, this happens for a small number of your users when a user logs in, adds something to their cart, starts checking out, or you’re in the admin panel, which renders new HTML for every single page load. With Lightspeed, a fully re-rendered page is required only occasionally for your customers. If your admin is “too slow”, you probably have problems that a hardware upgrade could address.
Magento Order Edits – Simpler, Easier, No Duplicate Orders
Thursday, July 15th, 2010Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
Well, we’ve just released another extension, this one centered around Magento order edits. We’ve worked through this solution a couple of times for other clients, working out the kinks. Essentially there were 3 issues we tried to address.
- Elimnate Magento’s duplicate order on edit
- Make editing an order more user friendly for Customer Service Reps
- Provide flexibility for developers to adjust the module as needed
Magento Add X PromoBot Module Released
Tuesday, July 13th, 2010After an incredibly long dry spell (yes, we’ve been that busy), we’re releasing another Magento Module. While there are several who’ve been asking for True Edit Order, we’re releasing module to fix a promotional issue that has been requested since our first install: the Magento ‘Add X, PromoBot’ Module.
Since our first Magento client, we’ve thought you ought to be able to add a product to the cart, and get another product automatically added to the cart for free without having to bundle the products. We like the conditions available in Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules, and naturally expected to be able to leverage those to trigger the addition of a product to the cart. Now we can, and by extension, the rest of the Magento Community can as well.
The module allows the creation of Shopping Cart Price Rules as they currently stand in Magento, but adds an additional action which automatically adds product(s) to the cart for free. While bundling products together seems to accomplish the immediate need, this module provides the ability to set a rule once for an entire category, and layering conditions (ex: 2 jeans, Men’s category, priced above $50 ea.). Obviously, there are benefits for this flexibility.
The module does have a single restriction, which we may address in the future: a condition which does not specify actual products (ex: shopping cart subtotal) MUST be layered with a condition which does. Any rule using this new extended promotional action must include at least 1 condition to specify product (sku, category, item price, etc.). We can live with that for now.
As an additional note, we are releasing True Edit Orders within the next few weeks… if luck holds.
Lightspeed Magento Module improves user experience and aids SEO.
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
In April Google announced that they are officially considering page load times as part of their algorithm. Google decided that this is important because users spend less time on slow sites, and quick page load times make happier users. From an SEO standpoint load times don’t carry the weight of relevant content or incoming links, but in competitive keywords, load times can give you an edge on the competition. According to Google any page load slower than 1.5 seconds is slow.
Google Page Load Time Graph
Pushing the limits of Rackspace’s Cloud Hosting for Magento
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand… You won’t go back to Rackspace (Guides)
I’m the almost business guy, so don’t expect a lot of technical information as you read this. However, there are some interesting Magento / Environment things happening in our office that are worth mentioning. I’ll do it, since the real technical people are busy changing the world.
Our big push right now is extending the limits of Rackspace’s cloud environment. We’re finishing an enterprise ecommerce deployment that’s fully scalable, billed only for the hardware / bandwidth usage (which means automatically down to 1 web server at night, up to 6+ during peak traffic) in a totally secure, redundant cloud environment. Amazon has tools that make this possible, but the business guys for this large client said “No” (some sort of corporate jockeying).
Magento Page Caching Module… Finally
Wednesday, April 14th, 2010Lightning fast NEW scalable Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
It’s been a long while in the making, but we’ve finally sent off our first module into the world to fend for itself (Magento Lightspeed Page Caching Module). It’s been interesting to try to carve out time to get it simplified, while still servicing clients, but it’s been worth doing things right. It’s taught us a few things.
1. Test a lot. There have been a few details to iron out, and we’ve learned most people don’t work with Magento the way we do. We tried early to garner extended user testing by offering free versions to several companies in exchange for their feedback. No feedback. I guess we get what we pay for. We did have a few companies stumble across the caching modules and purchase (a little before we were really ready). They’ve been very helpful and patient in their feedback.
2. It takes a lot to work out all the business details when it’s your business, and you’re pulling a different business model together while still performing other work. Still, in our current economy, our efforts to remain debt free have proven worth the extra effort. Now that the bulk of the set up is finished, we’ll very likely get more modules out without the extensive waiting.
3. You can’t build a great product if you don’t have great people working together. We’ve been uptight about hiring the best, and it’s proven essential. Hiring the right people, and helping them work together and thrive has been one of the best things we’ve ever done.
Slow Magento… Not Anymore
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010Lightning fast NEW Magento Hosting. Easy, powerful, on-demand. (Guides)
We’ve read a lot about Magento being too slow. It’s a tremendously robust application with unlimited flexibility, so if you don’t know enough, it is. Discouraging. You’ll lose your job. Sad.
We didn’t know enough when we first started, went through the frying pan–fire thing, learned a ton, and have since created Magento sites with Google-like response times. Not discouraging. Keep our jobs. Take over the world.
Here’s a brief overview of making “slow” Magento serve 100x more content, 90% faster than a default Magento installation. Current page responses are in the 80-150 ms range for cached pages, 250 ms for pages including dynamic content (login status or cart).
Magento Commerce, hold the Commerce
Thursday, January 14th, 2010We’ve just completed another potato site developed on the Magento platform, and neither has even a hint of ecommerce. Ironic really.
Idahoan (www.idahoan.com) just moved to #1 in the Processed Potato industry, up from #2 when we started. Our latest site (www.klondikebrands.com) is a sub-brand site for the largest supplier of fresh potatoes in the U.S. (brands include the Green Giant). Our design office has also done some of their recent packaging, so Christmas resulted in a 7 foot Green Giant statue as the new office mascot. HO, HO, HO.
Releasing a Magento Optimization Module
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010“How hard can it be?” we thought. “We’ve already developed Magento optimization modules and we build custom ecommerce sites, so it should be easy to launch our own extensions.” What a learning experience.
We were right, of course, about the technical side of releasing a Magento extension. It’s pretty simple to provide a download. Our difficulty has mainly been protecting code once it’s released, both technically and legally. We’re close on both fronts, but it’s been a roadblock to an otherwise fast track to release.
Holiday Sales and Better Magento Bundled Products
Friday, December 11th, 2009We’re watching Zumiez Holiday results. It’s a LOT of fun.
Among other things, we’re watching a custom Magento Bundled Product module consistently drive up sales and average order value. The enhanced bundled products have accounted for 5-7 of the top 10 selling products for weeks/months (we haven’t really looked beyond 2 weeks).