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Why a Magento Deployments eBook?
Home Page
Often the home page will be the first place consumers have a true
interaction with your brand online. Carefully consider the emotions it
conveys to site visitors. Think about the big picture — how do
design, features and functionality, and content interact to
differentiate your brand?
Help your visitors answer the question, “Does this brand reflect who I
am?” (This is particularly important for luxury and premium brands.)
Consider if standard navigation is what makes the most sense for your
site. In many cases, a custom navigation is more appropriate and
can have a significant impact in leading customers through the buying
process.
Though your home page may be the main doorway for many visitors,
it’s important to also understand that — due to search engines and
social networking sites — websites can no longer be seen as
hierarchical. Instead, visitors can enter your site from any page, even
one very low on your standard navigation.
For this reason, every page in your website has to be able to stand
alone. Product pages are no longer the end of a navigation process
throughout your site — they are self-sufficient, optimized units
that must portray your brand ideal immediately.
Personalized
Navigation
A site’s organizational
structure won’t always
align with people's
immediate needs.
Personalized
navigation offers a
consistent “home,”
as a footer
customized for that
particular visitor,
that features
information such as
their site profile, wish
list, cart, visual order
history, and groups.
One-Page Checkout
For example, one-page checkouts like the one below see a cart
abandonment rate of only 40-45% (20% less than the industry
average of 60-65%).
Quick-View Modals
Many companies assume that Magento will not scale to meet their
needs. This is based either on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) on
the part of threatened closed-source vendors, or from falsely
assuming that Magento out of the box is the only option.
We’ve deployed Magento at significant scale for many clients,
and will share a few of our secrets here.
Improving Magento Speed & Performance
We used our own proprietary caching system wrapper that sits outside
of Magento and intercepts requests, and keeps them from going
through Magento unless it is necessary.
80% of the page load time is spent downloading all the components of
the page, such as: images, stylesheets, scripts and more. Think about
the impact that speeding this process could have on your overall site
speed!
In some cases, such as for the client mentioned above, total site
caching in a preferred option. This directs all non-secure traffic to
the CDN so it acts as a site proxy — serving cached content and
passing through requests for dynamic content to our Magento front-
end servers.
Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing
Plan for disaster. Servers can fail at any time on the cloud, and do so
at a higher frequency than on traditional hardware. Reduce the number
of SPOFs (single points of failure), and automate recovery procedures.
Actively monitor server performance to avoid server failures. If a
customer can’t access the site when they want to make a purchase,
they may go to a competitor instead.
Cloud Computing
Think about all the different ways in which your customers interact
with and order from your company, and how they will integrate with
the ecommerce experience.
For example: How will orders placed by phone be managed? Will they
integrate back with online order tracking? What is the management
process for orders placed online to be picked up in store?
Finding the best way to make your multiple systems “talk” with one
another may be a lengthy process in itself.
How can you effectively transfer customer data from one system to
another? Manual transfer is a tedious and time-intensive task,
especially when data differs across systems.
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