Support for Tag-Handling: HTML or XML at Your Command

First up, we’ve added support for taghandling, a feature that gives you the power to specify how tags should be treated during the translation process. This is particularly useful for those working with web content or any text that includes formatting tags.

With this update, you can now choose whether to handle tags as HTML or XML. This means that Deepl Translator will recognize and preserve the structure of your content, ensuring that formatting and layout remain intact after translation. This is a game-changer for maintaining the integrity of your web pages, making the translation process smoother than ever.

Customize Formality Levels for Your Translations

Understanding the nuances of language formality is essential when translating content for different audiences and contexts. With this in mind, we’re excited to unveil a new dropdown in the admin configuration of DeepL Translator. This dropdown allows you to set the formality level for translations across various languages, supporting:

• German (DE)
• French (FR)
• Italian (IT)
• Spanish (ES)
• Dutch (NL)
• Polish (PL)
• Portuguese, Brazilian (PT-BR)
• Portuguese, European (PT-PT)
• Japanese (JA)
• Russian (RU)

By tailoring the formality level to specific languages, you can ensure that your translations strike the right tone—from formal business communications to casual social media posts—making your content more engaging and culturally appropriate.

Why It Matters

At DeepL, we are committed to continuously improving our platform to meet the evolving needs of our users. These new features are designed to save you time, maintain accuracy, and uphold the nuances of language—no matter the complexity of your content.

We invite you to explore these new capabilities and discover how they can streamline your translation processes and elevate the quality of your multilingual communications.

Your Feedback Matters

We’d love to hear your thoughts on these new features. Your feedback is invaluable to us as we continue to develop and refine DeepL Translate. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any comments, suggestions, or questions.

Default Settings

The main thing you need to do is go through all configuration points and change every single default setting. The default Magento installation is pretty useless when it comes to SEO. It has certain settings, but they are insufficient for proper search engine optimization and fighting competition.

You can’t leave the default settings as they are and you will still need to go through them and tune everything up before installing any third-party SEO extensions.

Changing URLs/Deleting Pages

If you change URLs or delete pages and don’t set up a proper redirect, it will cause more 404 mistakes on your website. Google says it’s okay to have some URLs returning 404 pages, but still they want you to fix them. Just go to System, then Configuration, then Catalog, and Create Permanent Redirect for old URLs. Its good to eliminate these as nothing scares a customer off more than a 404 message!

Image Optimization

Magento doesn’t change the name of the product image or add an alt tag so you will have to do this yourself if you want your images bring you passive traffic from search engines, and SEO friendly name tags. Try Extendware’s Image Optimization  extension to optimize your images and reduce their size without sacrificing image quality!

Default Descriptions

If you go to System, then Configuration, Design, HTML Head and finally Default description and enter it, Magento will put this description to all pages without a custom description. Remember that each of your pages is considered to be unique, including meta tags.

Translated Page URL’S

If your product is site.com/product.html for the English language, you should have different URLs for the same product in other languages as well. I learned that you have to change it for each language your store is geared towards. Make sure to do it on all pages too not just home page, which means all product pages!

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets are a great way to have more exposure and attention without necessarily being in top 3. Results in Google with rich snippets have higher CTR and more clicks. Implementing rich data is pretty easy and should be only be made once.

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

rel=”alternate” connects pages with the same content, but in different languages so don’t ignore it! You might even want to use another tool – “x-default hreflang” for international landing pages. Make sure to link translated pages with each other. It is usually done through country flags or links with language names’.

Layered Navigation/SEO Optimization

Leaving Magento layered navigation as the default or third-party, without tuning SEO settings is an important mistake which may lead to hundreds of pages with messy URLs and duplicate content. Check out Extendware’s Layered Navigation extension to increase sales by making your catalog more filterable, aesthetically appealing, and faster for your customers to find the products they want!

XML sitemap

To make sure all of your store pages are indexed and re indexed properly and fast, you will need to upgrade your XML sitemap. Make sure to check the content before submitting it to Google Webmaster Tools. Default Magento XML sitemap only includes products and category pages and doesn’t contain images.

Duplicate Issues

Ok so Magento is a culprit of duplicate content, which Google hates! Product Sorting can increase the effectiveness of your online product catalog and can increase your conversion rates. Sort products on your sales page by Best Sellers, Top Performers, Most Viewed, Number of Reviews, and more. Easily cascade your sorting options – such as always showing in stock items first. For more info check out Extendware’s Product Sorting extension.

Load Speed

Load speed on any website is an official Google ranking factor. An e-commerce store’s speed influences bounce rate and customer’s likeliness to return. Magento itself is very slow in terns of site speed and SEO. So it is recommended to use a cache service such as Extendware’s Full Page Cache extension. This will reduce your Magento store’s First Byte Time, increase your web server request rate, reduce database load, and make your store much more responsive!

All in all, Magento is a great platform for my business, but like anything, it takes time and investment in the right tools to make it run fast and efficient. For more tools that focus on SEO and performance, visit Extendware’s Performance Extensions. They are sure to help you like they did me!

Have questions on the spot? Extendware now has a live chat!

The simple answer is, the Extendware Full Page Cache does not need or use Varnish because Varnish is not well implemented for the Magento platform. In fact, there are two specific reasons that FPC is a much better solution for a Magento store than using the Varnish caching solution.

Reason 1: Few Database Requests and a Higher Cache Hit Rate

But while anyone can go to Magento’s website and set up a basic store, creating a successful e-commerce business can be considerably harder.

Magento offers so many different options for customization that many new users feel overwhelmed and intimated. So many different tasks go into running a successful online store:  SEO, web design, marketing, and many more. Magento extensions help online business owners to complete necessary tasks on time and without hassle. Here are some common problems that Magento users encounter—and how extensions can help solve them:

Lagging Loading Times

All research suggests that today’s web users are more impatient than ever. If an online store takes too long to load, visitors to your site won’t buy. While you can’t always control the speed with which users browse your site, there are ways to lower your load times. An extension such as the Full Page Cache will speed up your site by caching it whenever a user visits. This extension serves as a replacement to expensive investments in hardware.

Google Analytics Overload

Traffic is essential to the success of your business, so it can be tempting to visit Google Analytics constantly. But this is an inefficient use of time. With the Google Analytics Dashboard extension, you can see your Google Analytics data right from your dashboard.

Spam, Spam, and More Spam!

There are bots looking to spam your inbox. If you have a contact page on your website, you may be vulnerable to spam. The Anti-Spam Captcha prevents this annoyance, requiring users to enter a short string of characters before their message goes through.

Conversion Confusion

E-commerce is a global phenomenon, but international customers may be turned off if they can’t easily figure out how much they will need to pay for a particular item. Customers also may be unaware that you have separate storefronts for buyers from different countries. The Store/ Currency Switcher extension will enable your Magento store to redirect to the correct storefront.

Abandoned Carts

The bane of every online retailer, abandoned carts can seriously reduce your profits. In 2015, the average rate of cart abandonment was a whopping 68%, meaning that more than two-thirds of online orders were never completed. For e-commerce business owners, few things can be more frustrating. But with the Abandoned Cart Email extension, you can send a friendly reminder e-mail to customers who abandon their carts on your store. The e-mail sequence can be completely customized. You can even include a coupon for customers to incentivize them to complete their purchase.

Running an online store is already difficult. By making strategic use of Magento extensions, you can make better use of your resources and increase the profits of your online store.

All ExtendWare extensions come with the option to return within return within 30 days and receive a full refund —making this investment risk-free.

Having a Slow Magento Administrative Backend can be a real waste of your time

Not only for you, but also your employees if you have them. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to save categories and products with ease? If these issues sound familiar then Extendware’s Improved Indexing is the extension for you!

More Great Features of Improved Indexing

Increase Responsiveness of Admin Backend
Saving products, categories, and more will be much faster, which will allow you to get more work done faster.

Optimize Catalog URL Rewrites 
We include optimizations that optimize the slowest index for large stores: catalog URL rewrites.

Save Time and Save Money
The faster you can get work done in the admin area means you will be able to do more work or have more free time. If you have employees, then the increased employee productivity will enable you to save employment costs.

View How Much Time You Have Saved
You can easily view how much time has been saved as a result of using Improved Indexing for Magento.

Re-Index Manually or On Schedule
Re-indexing events will be processed periodically with a cronjob or you can manually force the processing of events if desired.

Full Page Cache Support
If you are using Extendware’s Full Page Cache, then deferred indexing is compatible out-of-the-box.

Quick Improved Indexing Extension Overview

“What’s the hold up?” You might ask yourself while waiting for your page to load. After trying every solution to fix this issue, you might be surprised to realize its something as simple as a photo! Images, although very important in communicating your products, can sometimes be too large and slow up your customer browser cache. With Image Optimization you can alleviate this issue and improve search engine ranking.

Here are some other great perks you will gain with this Extension 

Optimize Images Without Losing Image Quality
Image quality is very important in order to sell products online. As a result, all image optimization will ensure no image quality is lost.

No Need to Install Server Software 
The smushit online API is used (not yahoo which is shutdown, but resmushit which is available) so you do not need to install any server software. You can of course continue to optimize on your server if you want or need to.

Optimize Catalog Product Images
Optimize product images and add forever expiries to them to better use the browser cache.

Search Engine Optimize Catalog Product Images 
Make the name of the product image the same as the product name to improve search engine rank.

Optimize Skin Images
Optimize skin images and add forever expiries to them to better use the browser cache.

Optimize Media Images
Optimize media images and add forever expiries to them to better use the browser cache.

Optimize Images in Any Directory 
Easily add any directory of images you want to optimize and all the images in the directory will be optimized.

Compatible With Almost All CDNs
Image optimization is compatible even if you use a content delivery network.

Improve the Browser Cache Management of Images Files
Your catalog and CSS images will be rewritten and cached in a similar way as the Javascript and CSS. This means that once a user downloads an image, they never have to request that image on your server again. This can save dozens of server requests per page load and save hundreds of kilobytes per page load. On a default Magento Commerce install, this saves 20 web requests per page load just for the CSS images alone.

Reduce Bandwidth
Image optimization will reduce bandwidth requirements for your store which can save money.

If you can believe it, the above list is not a complete list of features. Please try the online demo or install as a risk free trial and take advantage of our risk-free 30 day refund guarantee to fully see the power and elegance of the Image Optimization extension.

I think many can agree that default Magento promotions are pretty boring and outdated, and what’s worse is…you can’t create new ones! They are very standard and don’t offer much in the way of creativity, which really cancels out the look and feel of a unique website. Extendware has the solution with Shopping Cart Price Rules, allowing you to offer 24 completely new discount actions. This way you can keep your customers engaged during the most important part of the transaction…the sale!

Here are some of the great promotions you can add with this software. We shall use a clothing store as an example.

• “Buy one product and get another product with X discount”
• “Buy two shirts and receive the 3^rd for 50% off”
• “Buy 5 products for the normal price and get 20% off each additional product
• “Get $15 off for every $150 spent”
• “Buy 2 pairs of pants and get the 3^rd for $10”
• “Buy a shirt and pants for $75 total”
• “All hats for $5.99”

Discounting merchandise this way can be extremely effective. Consumers love a deal and with the options and templates provided here, you can change your promotions as often as you want and see what works and what doesn’t.  You can specify exact products or be more general and specify the categories. (i.e. Black Nike Sneakers vs. Tennis Shoes)

More Great Features of Shopping Cart Price Rules

More Easily Manage Your Promotions
Shopping Cart Price Rules can be deleted or inactivated in bulk, have it’s priority changed, or have it’s date start / expiration changed. This can all be done by the enhanced shopping cart price rules grid that is included.

Create “Buy One Product and Get Another Product with X Discount”.
Easily create discounts such as “Buy 2 pants and get a tie for 20% off” or “Buy 3 pants and get a tie for $15.00” etc. You can create a variety of discounts that are conditioned on purchasing another product. You can discount by either percent or fixed discount or make it a fixed price.

Create Promotions Like “Buy 2 Shirts and Receive the 3rd for 50% Off”
Creating promotions in a series (every 2nd, every 3rd, etc) which allows promotions such as “buy 3 products and the 3rd receive 20% discount”. You can select whole categories or select individual products to determine which are eligible. You can also discount by a percentage, a fixed amount, or set the discounted product to a certain price.

Don’t Apply Promotions to Products with a Special Price
Products with a special price are usually already deeply discounted, so discounting them further would mean the product would be sold for a loss. Easily ensure that products with a special price do not receive any further discounts.

Create Discounts for the Cheapest / Most Expensive Product in the Cart
It is very popular to create general discounts based on most / least expensive product in the cart. For example, buy any 3 shoes and the cheapest (or most expensive) shoe will receive a 10% discount. You can use any combination you want to create powerful and motivating discounts based on cheapest / most expensive products.

Create Promotions like “Buy 5 Products at Normal Price and Get 20% / $20 Off Each Additional Product”
Encourage large orders by giving a discount after a certain quantity has been purchased using our After-N discount actions. For example, “all shirts purchased after 5 cost $20.00 / receive 10% off / etc” or even “buy 3 belts and every belt after will cost $10.00”. As you can imagine, this is a powerful way to increase sales.

Create Fixed Price Promotions Like “Buy Two Pants and the 3rd Costs $10.00 (or is Free)”
Fixed price discounts are especially powerful. Using our Each-Nth discounts (each 2nd product, 3rd product, etc) it is very easy to create common promotions such as buy 1 shirt and get the 2nd for $10.00. Or even something like buy 5 ties and receive the 6th for free.

Give Discounts Based on Money Spent Such as Get $10.00 Off for Every $100.00 Spent
Encourage large orders by giving a discount after a certain quantity has been purchased. For example, “buy any 5 shirts at full price and each additional shirt will receive a 20% discount” or even “buy 3 pants and every pants after that will cost $30.00”. As you can imagine, this is a powerful way to increase sales.

Create a Fixed Price Promotion for a Set of Products Like “Buy a Keyboard and a Mouse for $100.00”
A great way to generate sales is to offer a fixed price for a certain set of products. You can easily do this with our Set Discount Accounts. You can specify the exact products or you can specify the categories.

Create Fixed Discounts for a Group Such as “Buy Any 5 Shirts for $100.00”
Discounts can also be applied to a group of products. You can specify the products that are valid for the group by category or individually.

Offer Fixed Discount Amount for Each 2nd / 3rd / etc Product Such as “Buy 3 Shirts and Get $20.00 of the 3rd Shirt”
In addition to using our Each-Nth discount account this will work with our After-Nth discount action so you can create a promotion like “Buy 3 shirts and every shirt purchased after 3 will receive $10.00 off”.

Create a Promotion For a Set of Products Such as “Buy the Pants and Shoes Together and Get 20% off Each”
Another way to discount when using our Set discount action is to give a percent off when the full set of products is in the cart. A product set can be two products from two different categories or the specific products can be defined.

Apply Discounts Only to Products with Specific Custom Options
Discount can be set to only apply to products with a specific custom option or if the custom option value is set to a specific value. For example, if you sell electronics and a warranty is a custom option, then you can have a discount only if the warranty is selected.

Support for Multiple Stores
If you have 1 store or 100 stores within your Magento installation it will work for each store.

Support for Multiple Currency and Tax Rules
Multiple currencies and tax rules are supported for promotions created with Shopping Cart Price Rules.

The Shopping Cart Price Rules extension from Extendware also has an enhanced promotions grid to help you organize and manage the promotions you are running or plan to run. Also it will support multiple currencies and tax rules which makes it easy for any region.

If you can believe it, the above list is not a complete list of features. Please try the online demo or install as a free trial and take advantage of our risk-free 30 day refund guarantee to fully see the power and elegance of the Magento Shopping Cart Price Rules extension.

A process called Minification will help to alleviate all of these issues. It simply means that all of the unnecessary characters in your page’s source code will be extracted and your store pages will be as compact as possible when sent over the internet.

With Minify Js/CSS HTML you can :

Minify Your Javascript, CSS, and HTML

The Minify Js / CSS extension reduces the size of your Javascript, CSS, and HTML using 1 of 4 minify technologies (JSMin, JSMin Plus, YUI Compressor, and Closure Compiler). These technologies work by removing comments, rewriting CSS statements in a more efficient manner, removing white space, and rewriting Javascript variables. This extension will even minify your inline JS / CSS. On a default Magento Commerce install, you can expect the following (as shown in the graph found in the product image gallery):

Ability to Defer Loading of Javascript Loading for Even Faster Loading

Easily enable javascript deferment to eliminate render-blocking javaScript so that your page loads will not block while waiting for javascript to load. This can greatly improve google page speed score for javascript compatible with deferred loading.

Minify Inline Javascript                                                                               

Javascript is only half the story. The HTML and Javascript / CSS that are inside of each of your pages are equally important. Importantly, this data cannot be cached by the browser, so it must be downloaded on every page request. Other solutions completely ignore inline data.

Versioning of JS / CSS Files                                                                            

Ensure your content is always up-to-date. No need to flush caches or wait for files to be updated on the frontend. Your files will show any changes you have made immediately.

Intelligently Combine Javascript

On a default Magento Commerce install, the number of Web server requests will be reduced by 16 (this number is usually even higher on a non-default install). This significantly reduces request latency and bandwidth and marginally reduces the HTML size of page. Also, it means your Web server will not have to work as hard which will allow you to server more requests per second.
Do not compare the Extendware Minify JS / CSS extension’s ability to combine files with other modules.

Compress your Javascript and CSS                                                                        

Your Javascript and CSS will be compressed using 3 different compression algorithms (gzip, gzdefalt, and gzcompress). All files are pre-compressed, so they are not compressed on a per-request basis. This reduces latency and CPU load and speeds up high traffic Web sites.

Minify Non-Standard JS / CSS Files                                                                      

Some themes directly output javascript / css files to the theme instead of following Magento standards. Usually these cannot be minified, but with our technology they can be minified!

Improve the Browser Cache Management of Javascript / CSS files 

Javascript and CSS files have forever expiries added to them. This means that once downloaded the user will never have to make another request for your Javascript and CSS. This reduces latency, bandwidth, and your server load. When making changes to files the changes will still appear immediately on the site as the filenames will change.

Ability to Change Hostnames of URLs

Browsers generally have a 2-5 connection limit per hostname. For this reason it makes sense to use mutliple hostnames, so the browser will make more connections which can reduce download time. We support selecting custom hostnames for certain urls to maximize the number of browser connections.

Choose the Minification Algorithms that is Best for Your Needs

Different algorithmns have different characteristics and requirements. We don’t limit your choice. We include them all so that your site can be optimized as much as possible.

Compatible With Almost All CDNs                                                                          

Minifying javascript / css is compatible even if you use a content delivery network.

So simply install the Minify Js / CSS extension and reduce page size, bandwidth, request count, and server load and your customers will thank you!

If you can believe it, the above list is not a complete list of features. Please try the online demo or install as a install as a risk free trial and take advantage of our risk-free 30 day refund guarantee to fully see the power and elegance of the Minify JSS/CSS extension.

What is “Full Page Cache” for Magento?

We all know that patience is a virtue; unfortunately we all know that many customers do not care about waiting around for your store to load, they want it NOW! Even the smallest bug or delay causes decreased conversions and lower sales.

It is funny to think that the average customer will wait 10 minutes in line at a store, but more than 12 seconds waiting on a search online? Forget it! Frustration is at its peak!

If increasing Magento page speed is a concern to you and your business, than optimizing your Magento store with Extendware Full Page Cache can help lower your customer wait time and speed up your store loading times significantly.

This video helps explain Full Page Cache and how the Extendware Full Page Cache extension is different, more capable, and more powerful than the other competitor Full Page Cache extensions available.

Just click below to play.

Benefits of Using Extendware Full Page Cache for Magento Site Optimization

• Very Limited Database Usage – Extendware’s FPC uses a super fast primary cache so that it does not have to touch the database for over 90% of all actions.

Why does that matter? Because every time your application or store makes a call to the database, it slows down your page processing because your system has to wait for the database to respond. One call won’t make much of a difference, but a few hundred database calls every transaction can really slow down your page response time.

Our Full Page Cache gets around this by handling 90% of your requests in memory, not by calling your database, so it is much faster than how Magento’s default caching settings work. This translates into a speed similar to a Varnish caching solution, yet with a better cache hit rate, form key support, and our Full Page Cache is much easier to configure.

• High Page Cache Hit Rate – Your store will not be fast – even with a good page caching extension – if no one actually uses the cache. That is why a high cache hit rate (the percent of requests that load directly from page cache instead of the database) is important. Our cache has an excellent hit rate that far surpasses the current and previous Varnish caching solutions.
• Ability to Flush Multiple Modified Pages – Our extension gives you the ability to flush the entire page cache, flush groups of pages (all product pages, all cms pages), or flush only specific pages of an affected product. Having multiple flushing choices ensures that you don’t flush what you don’t need to, which increases your cache hit rate.
• Easy to Configure – Most stores only need to install it and enable it and it will auto-configure! It couldn’t be easier. Only more advanced use-cases or extreme customization require more involved configuration.
• Supports Product Catalog Sorting – Extendware Full Page Cache has full support for catalog sorting. Other page caches do not support changing the sort order in the catalog the way Magento does by default. As a result, it is possible for the default category sort order to be cached incorrectly when you are using other full page cache solutions. Our solution won’t incorrectly cache the default category sort order.
• Highly Configurable – The out-of-the-box solution page cache is extremely easy to configure and is very simple to just plug and play. However, that does not mean it cannot be configured to operate in different ways for many different environments. The FPC extension includes lots of configuration options so it can fit every use case and grow as your store grows!

As you can see, Extendware’s Full Page Cache increases the page load speed for your Magento website, reduces the load on the server and database and improves the ranking in search engines.

Take action and save your customers (and your wallet) valuable time. You can make your Magento website the fastest on the market and drastically improve your conversion rate and overall sales!

Full Page Cache reduces your Magento store’s First Byte Time, Increases your web server request rate, reduces database load, and makes your store much more responsive. Extendware’s Caching solution is the best Magento Caching Performance Extension you can buy to speed up your store and easily pays for itself by saving you money rather than buying expensive hardware solutions to increase your Magento store optimization rates.

Use Extendware Page Cache

The Magento Full Page Cache extension by Extendware will reduce load on the database and server load and improve First Byte Time. The result is a much faster and more stable store. For most Magento stores this speed tip will provide the single fastest improvement in Magento speed.

Minify Javascript / CSS / HTML

Once the First Byte Time is super fast you will want to ensure the Download Time is fast. This is another component of Magento page load. To do this you will want to use the Minify JS / CSS extension which will reduce the size of javascript / css and HTML pages. In addition, it can improve browser caching, do pre-compression and a lot more.

Optimize Images

Very few stores are optimizing images which is quite important considering that images change on every page load. This means that the browser cache is not effectively used. So, though a small improvement on a per-page basis it produces a large speed benefit in aggregate. The easiest way to optimize images is with the Image Optimizatoin extension.

Enable Flat Catalog in Magento

The bottleneck of Magento is almost always the database. To improve the speed of database reads you should use enable Flat Catalog in magento under System -> Configuration -> Catalog -> Frontend. This will reduce the number of database joins done when showing products and as a result reduce MySQL query complexity. The end result is more speed.

Optimize MySQL Configuration

Many stores run MySQL configurations that are not optimized for Magento. Magento use a lot of indexes and a lot of joins. As a result, it will need adequate memory for both of these activities.

Enable Magento Cache

Magento has an internal cache for its configuration, layouts, and blocks. Some stores forget to enable this, so ensure that this is enabled in System -> Cache Management.

Remove 3rd Party Extensions

If you are using extensions that were not created by Extendware, then you will want to disable them. About 50% of all store performance issues are caused by poorly created extensions. When possible you will want to use Extendware extensions as they created with performance in mind.

Enable System Compilation

Magento can combine the PHP files of your store, so that it uses less disk access. This is called System Compilation and can be important if you do not use an opcode cache or you are not on SSD disks. To enable this you can go to System -> Tools -> Compilation.

Review your Hosting Provider

Many hosting companies are oversold and do not offer good performance for the money. In addition, some are just not compatible with Magento. For example, Siteground is a poor choice for Magento hosting as its limitations are too restrictive to run a well-run Magento store. Choosing a better host will help your business reach the next level.

Use a PHP OpCode Cache

A PHP OpCode Cache such as APC can speed up the loading of the PHP files which results in an improved Magento Store speed. This is especially important if you are not using hosting with SSD disks.