Slow Magento Checkout / Product Editing? It’s the cache!

How many times have you you experienced a slow down from your Magento store when :

  • Checking out (specifically the last step)
  • Saving products in the administrative area

If so, you are likely suffering from a bloated, inefficient cache. You need Performant Cache Backends for Magento to resolve this issue.

Why do these areas of store operation slow down?

These areas attempt to flush the cache by tags. The problem with the cache implementation in Magento is that a flush by tags will cause a full scan on the cache directory in order to find cache items matching the tag. For smaller stores that only need to scan a few hundred files this is no problem. Larger stores, with thousands of cache objects, will experience major slow downs. Sometimes as a high as 30-60 seconds. With our Performant Cache Backends flushing by tags will take a fraction of the time.

Is there any way to confirm that my store is being slowed due to this issue?

Yes. If these actions are faster when the cache is disabled or close to empty, then this indicates that part of the slow down is the result of this issue. Once the cache is full, then more files will need to be scanned, and checkout / product editing will become slower.


Quick Extension Overview

If checkout or product saving is slow, you need Redis support, or flushing by tags is slow, then you need our Performance Cache Backends extensions. You will receive an improved file based cache and a redis based cache that is optimized for tag flushing.


 

Performance of Merging Javascript / CSS in Magento

Minify-Js--Css-(Web)Summary: Built-in merging of Javascript / CSS will slow down your store. You need Magento Minify Javascript / Css to properly merge files

Many store owners are enabling Javascript / CSS merging in Magento in order to “increase performance”. You can go to System -> Developer and look under Javascript and CSS Settings to see if your store is currently merging Javascript / CSS. If you have enabled merging, then we recommend that you disable this setting now. If you need proper merging, then you should purchase Minify JS / CSS.

Why is built-in merging of Javascript / CSS bad?

It breaks the browser cache. Merging is not done in an intelligent way. It is done too aggressively as all files are merged into one css and one javascript file. This is effective one a single page, but is not effective for a site as complex as Magento. As your customers change page types (home page -> catalog page -> product page) then it will generate new merged URLs which breaks the browser cache and causes the redownloading of all your CSS / JS files.

Why does the default merging generate different URLs for different page types?

Different page types have different CSS / Javascript requirements. Your home page may include 10 javascript files while your catalog page might include 12 javascript files. As a consequence, the merge URL for the 10 file merge will be different than for the 12 file merge.

Does this mean it is better to disable merging?

Yes, your site will be faster if you disable merging. Alternatively, you can use Minify JS / CSS for Magento, which merges intelligently. Your Google Page Speed will decrease if you disable merging and do not use Site Optimizer. However, Google Page Speed only measures page speed. It does not measure site speed. An individually loaded page will be faster with merging enabled, but your entire site will be slower. So, if your customers visit more than one page, you want to disable merging.

Is there a way to verify merging is done properly or not?

Yes, go to the home page of your site and record all javascript / css urls. Then, do the same for a catalog page and a product page. Next, verify that the urls are all the same if the same content is shown. With default merging enabled, you will notice different urls and when you go to the urls you will notice that 90% of the javascript / css is duplicated among the different urls.


Quick Extension Overview

Speed up your site, improve your search engine site rankings and conversion rate, and improve your user experience in the process. Minify Js / CSS extension reduces page size, bandwidth, request count, and server load without anything more than installing this easy to use and feature-full extension.


 

Magento Full Page Cache Auto-flushing / Tagging

Extendware’s Magento Full Page Cache has an exciting new addon feature – Auto-flushing / tagging. The problem with many full page cache systems is that you must flush the entire cache after changing a product / category. This reduces the usefulness of the cache for quickly changing stores. Our Magento cache warmer / crawler extension alleviates this problem by periodically crawling your store to ensure pages are re-cached.

However, crawling is not a complete solution because it is not sufficiently real-time. Auto-flushing / tagging is the complete solution as it will delete affected pages after a product / category changes. With our tagging addon you can select the tagging level and auto-flushing events that will trigger the flushing of specific pages. This provides maximum flexibility and ensures content freshness for your store. Refer to the Extendware Magento Full Page Cache (FPC) product page for more information.

Magento Image Optimization Extension

Extendware’s Magento Image Optimization is very important when trying to improve your Google page speed. This is especially true because Magento will auto-resize your catalog product images and when it does this they are not in their most optimal form. Previously, having an magento image optimized store was impossible.

That has all changed! Now Magento Image Optimization will optimize your jpeg, gif, and png files so that they are as efficient and fast to download as possible. Some stores are seeing up to a 30% reduction in total page weight and nearly every store will see some reduction. Images are optimized efficiently in the background so that your site speed is not affected. If you are running an older version of Site Optimizer, then we highly recommend upgrading. Refer to the demo at the Magento Image Optimization product page.

Magento Loyalty Extension Released

Enhance sales and reward your most loyal customers with discounts. Loyalty programs allow you to incentivize customers to purchase from you instead of competitors. With our Magento Loyalty Program you will be able to incentive customers based on order history, average order amount, and account age. We provide you with 3 new sales rule for creating unique sales rules that reward a subset of your customers and we also provide a standard loyalty program based on order history. When customers feel like they have an investment in your business, they will be more likely to be repeat customers!

How is our loyalty program different?
It is extremely flexible. It provides 3 new sales rule and it also operates outside of sales rules. This means it will not conflict with any existing sales rules. It allows discounts on the marginal dollar, so customers do not have to place multiple orders to maximize discounts. View the Magento Loyalty Extension page for more information.

Magento Bulk Product Updating – Tier / Group Price Support!

Managing Tier / Group prices is very time consuming task in Magento. For each product you must make several clicks of the mouse and potentially input dozens of numbers. If you need to change 100s of products, this could take you hours or even days. Magento Bulk Product Updating solves this by allowing you to copy tier / group prices from another product. The following tier / group price features are supported:

  • Copy – Copy the tier/ group price from one product to other products.
  • Delete – Delete the tier / group price from products.

Each of these features can be applied to an unlimited number of products. If you have 100 products that all have the same tier / group prices, then you can update all 100 at the same time!

Note: Tier / group price actions are fully compatible with Magento Tier / Group Price Percentages.

Magento Product Labels Extension Released

Highlighting your special offers, featured products, sale items and more can improve your catalog’s conversion rate. What good is a promotion if you are not communicating the promotion effectively to your customers? Magento Product Labels allows you to highlight products by placing images / labels over the product image.

The number of marketing possibilities are endless. Mark items as being on clearance, put a graphic an “50% OFF” label on a product, or show which products are new in your catalog or which have free shipping. Magento Labels Extension includes advanced filtering rules and features. It is only limited by your imagination!

Informing customers of hot items, sales, etc is not the only use-case of Magento Labels. You can also use it to inform customers of special product characteristics. For example, highlight a product as being “100% natural”, “Organic”, “Made Locally”, “1 Year Guarantee” or anything else you can imagine. The goal is to communicate important information in an emphasized, visually pleasant way! You can even place multiple ribbons on a single product image.

Tier / Group Price Percentages Extension Released!

With Extendware’s Tier / Group Price Percentages you may now specify percentages for tier / group prices. This enables you to ensure that the tier / group price will always be a percentage of the product price. For example, let’s say you have a wholesale and a retail store and your normal store price is the retail price. Specific users login in order to view the wholesale price. You may now set the whole sale price to be 90% of the normal price, so all prices will appear to be 10% off to wholesale users.

Tier prices work in the same way. If you want to give a 5% discount when someone orders 5 or more a product, then set the tier price to be 95%. When you update the price, the tier price will automatically update to be 95% of the product price

As you can imagine, this will save you a lot of time when managing product tier / group prices!

Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions – Pricing Flexibility

Extendware’s Magento Bulk Product Updating and Mass Product Actions 1.0.5 has been released. This is the 5th release of our best in class mass actions Extension. In this release several important bug fixes / features have been added.

  • Change Price Based On Cost – Change the price of a product based on the product cost. This allows you to make the product price +20% of the product cost for example.
  • Change Special Price Based On Cost – Change the special price of a product based on the product cost. This allows you to make the product price +20% of the product cost for example.
  • Change Special Price Based On Price – A bug has been fix that prevented the special price from being changed based on price.

Combining the various price functions allows for some very powerful mass price changes. For example, you may set the produce price to be 50% of the cost. Next, you may set the special price to be -20% of the special price. This can be done across all your products, which saves your valuable time.

Magento Bot Blocker and Anti-Spam Captcha Released

Extendware’s Magento Anti-Spam Captcha is important for every store because spam reduces productivity, wastes server resources, and can make your site look unprofessional (in the case of spam reviews that advertise other Web sites). Magento Anti-spam Captcha fixes this by putting a CAPTCHA on your most important forms.

The only problem is that CAPTCHAs can annoy users and discourage your customers from performing certain activities. We have worked to solve this by implementing three new features in Spam and Bot Protection:

  • OpenCaptcha Support – Previously, only Google reCAPTCHA was supported, which some users found too difficult. Now we support OpenCaptcha, which is much easy for users to solve while still protecting from bots (reCAPTCHA is still supported for those that want it).
  • Unlocked Actions – After solving 1 CAPTCHA, you may configure for the next X actions to NOT require a CAPTCHA. This means that if a user writes a review on your Web site and solves a CAPTCHA, this will prove they are human. They will not be asked to solve another CAPTCHA until they perform X actions (X more reviews, X more contacts, etc).
  • Only Ask Guests – This feature has always existed, but has been under utilized. With this option only customers who are not logged in will be asked to solve a CAPTCHA. Logged in customers will not be asked.

With these changes we are confident that your store will find a better balance between protection from spammers and bots and between ensuring the user experience of your live, human customers is as good as possible.