Useful design tips for a Magento eCommerce store

A proper user interface and an excellent user experience are the major considerations when creating a Magento store. Magento comes with a very robust engine that keeps the online stores running efficiently round the clock. But what if the customer doesn’t get what they exactly are looking for and finds your store too complicated? Yes, these are a few issues your customers may face if your store’s UI is not designed well. A poor and unorganised navigational structure and interface can likely turn off the customers. Hence, developing a custom Magento theme is the best way to gain a wide customer base ensuring them a delightful shopping experience with an easy and quick navigational and buying process. 

Now, for building an easy-to-manage UI with Magento, you need to keep a few useful design tips in mind shared here by an expert Magento developer.

The first impression is always a prime factor:

The first impression of your store on the audience can either turn them into your permanent customers or can simply make them switch to the other stores. When it comes to an online store, aesthetics factor matters a lot and are as important as the functionalities and performance of the store. This makes it essential to focus on creating an attractive and visually appealing UI design for a Magento store. How an online store looks reveal a lot about the business or brand and also matters a lot in driving more customers. This makes it important to focus on the colors you are using, the font style, the words used for the UI content, the quality of graphics, and the other elements of the interface. Focusing on how you design the catalogue menu is also important when you are designing the interface. Keep the store UI simple, uncluttered, and attractive making the best use of the platform and its features. For the UI, you can use any of the responsive Magento themes also for a better result. 

Customisation is important:

Being an open-source eCommerce platform, Magento provides unlimited possibilities to customise online stores. Building a customised store is important to meet the business requirements accurately along with coping up with the demands of the customers as well. When you are working with Magento, the best way to create a customised design is by making use of the themes it comes with and choosing the right one after understanding the business needs and purpose. This will save your time in designing and customising from scratch. 

Make sure your design is responsive:

Maintaining the responsiveness of an online store is important. Different people use different devices, some may use a laptop, some desktop, some prefer to directly shop from their smartphones, while some use tablets. This makes it essential to create a fully-responsive store while designing. The UI must look the same with all the multimedia, content, and the other elements on all devices. For this, you can use the in-built responsive themes Magento comes with along with the other design features of the platform like AJAX compatibility, retina support, etc. Also, test the site on as many types of devices as possible to ensure it is responsive. 

Apart from these tips, including:

• A strong call to actions on the layout, and 
• Creating an SEO-friendly layout can add value to your store design. 

With Magento, maintaining all these above-mentioned points is simple.

If you are running an eCommerce business and want to build a highly interactive and customer-driven webshop for your business, then try out Magento and leverage its features. You can get in touch with PHPProgrammers, a reputed Magento development company in Australia to get your store built by the best Magento developers.

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Major Opencart Extensions to Help Boost Online Business

While running a successful eCommerce store, online merchants have to undertake the pivotal responsibility of meeting the expectations of the customers. While they keep on looking for new prospects to maximise revenue, one cannot deny that it is a challenging task to achieve. Opencart is one of the most preferred PHP based frameworks used to set up online/digital stores and business. It is open-source and flexible, providing the Opencart developers advanced tools and resourceful, beneficial extensions. Besides, this largely prevents businesses from failing miserably in the market.  

There are multiple reasons why most merchants take to the digital medium to conduct their sales. Operating platforms like Opencart enables them to fulfil their objective, by offering technologically progressive extensions that boost the business performance. Let us take a look at some of them.

• AdvancedSorting

This is a significant but extremely lightweight Opencart widget which extends and improves the default mechanism of sorting on this platform. By using this, you can improvise the sorting options such as on Category, Manufacturer, Special Pages, Search etc. this way, the customers get access to a more versatile and stable option for sorting things. It also allows them to discover or search for the things they need effortlessly and in less time. Hence this extension enables faster searching in the website so that customers get satisfactory user experience.  

•  Zopim Live Chat 

Through this, the merchant can effortlessly chat with their clients and consumers. They can respond to their queries without any difficulty. Almost like a live communication channel, you can build the trust of your customers and also satisfy them. This Opencart extension is one of the best since it adds to a smooth functional experience, offering various other notable features. It opens up like a subtle pop-up chat box which does not destroy the normal working of the site.  

• Discount on Leave

This Opencart extension offers the users an intuitive interface for admin. Here, you can add various other extensions/options which will engage your audiences so that they do not leave the website. Their multi-store feature enables you to create and set up many pop-ups on the website.

• SEO Pack Pro

This extension helps to improve the ranking of your concerned website in different search engine ranking pages. It meets all the requirements of SEO optimisation while also maintaining the status of an SEO friendly website. This pack/ extension helps one to generate URL, meta titles, keywords, descriptions in just a few simple clicks. You can also avail other important, useful; features: Custom product SEO fields, Automatic keyword generator, Smart SEO pagination etc. 

• Abandoned Carts

This Opencart extension implemented during Opencart development solves all the issues which are related to shopping carts which are faulty. This usually happens for those which are left behind without a full and thorough check. It sends manual and automatic notifications via email along with a discount hook to the customers. It is received in the form of an email template. 

As is noticeable, you can choose to work with many of these extensions. Reputed companies like PHPProgrammers provide this service at the most cost-effective price rates. They uplift the performance of your business website so that you can garner the advantages that come along with it. You are guaranteed to get good results from the usage of these advanced Opencart extensions.

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Best Magento SEO Extensions Of 2020

The platform of Magento is enriched with outstanding features, hence making for some of the best SEO extensions. Made by the Magento developer in Australia, know about some of the popular ones of the year 2020.  

Magento has gained an undeniable reputation as one of the superior most e-commerce platforms in the world. It supports the online stores, merchants and entrepreneurs to give a new dimension to their business digitally. From the aspect of theme, design, presentation to online marketing techniques, Magento helps you generate ROI driven outputs and revenue.  

What is Magento? 

Magento is an open-source PHP platform, a flexible marketing medium that is utilised by the merchants to set up their online stores. From practical content to functionality to aesthetics, Magento takes care of everything. Developed by the Magento Developer in Australia in the year 2013, it has since then shown scalable opportunities for managing complex customer behaviour. With Magento, you can also enjoy a powerful and steady marketing, high search engine optimisation results and tools for catalogue management.  

The design of Magento is exclusive and intuitive. It offers a variety of themes and plug-ins. Its custom functionality requires the businessman to configure it according to his requirement. This robust operating system is compatible with the other systems, highlighting how speed and well-defined affinity of a website is the main essence of eCommerce.   

How is Magento the best for eCommerce SEO?

The feature-packed system of Magento is best for search engine optimisation results. Today, Magento powers almost 30% of the websites on the Internet, among which 16% are the top ones. The attractive elements that it offers make it most favourable for SEO. These key elements directly impact the SEO outcome, bringing more traffic and search ranking for the online stores, without hampering user experience.

Some of the best Magento SEO extensions of the year 2020 

• SEO Suite Ultimate

This is a kind of fortress which provides guaranteed benefits to the website. It draws more customers. Most importantly, you save a lot of precious time required in the management of huge metadata. You can also effortlessly deal with all content which is duplicated to optimise richer snippets. Here there are advanced XML and HTML sitemaps for easy navigation, appropriate indexing and crawling.    

• SEO Toolkit

Another significant Magento SEO extension, by using this one can bring their website to new levels of appreciation, attract more customers and stand out among the competitors. Through this extension, you can also-  

1. Create your metatag 
2. Build strong sitemaps  
3. Export and import product tags  
4. Build appealing URLs
5. Do SEO friendly product reviews 

• Advanced SEO

While doing SEO can be a tiring task, by using Advanced SEO you can automate your tasks besides employing many other features - 

1. Rewriting URL of the product 
2. Optimising the URL for tags, reviews, SERP etc 
3. Make custom product URLs via advanced templates 
4. Make automatic meta description for products 
5. Automatic processing of previous data 

• Ultimate SEO Suite for Magento 1

Another highly capable SEO extension, after using this, you can boost a hoard of goodies/ items/products for the online store. This acts as a plausible solution using which you can effortlessly fight all the duplicated websites, add canonical URLs on the top section of the product page. You can also do the following -

1. Canonical URL in sitemaps - This is one of the best ways to ensure whether your website is working efficiently. By doing this, you can also check whether your site is getting indexed by the search engine bots. 
2. Canonical URL in Google Sitemap - This is an automatically generated URL which you can submit to Google so that the search engines crawl and index your websites.  
3. Picture support - Always include pictures in the sitemap so that Google will index them on its own and bring more traffic to the business website.  
4. Splitting Google sitemap - The Google search engine generally accepts 50,000 URLs per one sitemap. The file size has to be 10 MB. This is not necessary for larger websites. With the ultimate SEO suite, the sitemaps can be divided into smaller files which are manageable and easily approved by Google.

While there are many other SEO extensions to choose from, a good and robust one can empower your website for the better. You can analyse your business in the best manner and make profits. So, never forget to use these plugins for the best outcomes.

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5 Best Ways To Create WooCommerce Staging Site

As an owner of WooCommerce store, you should think about the staging site, which is quite smart and essential. A staging site is a  duplicate model site of the existing store in WordPress, along with two key differences such as:

- It is not accessible for the audience.
- The changes, which are made in the staging site will not influence the live site.

Therefore, the experimental environment of a staging site, providing you with a valuable scope to bring impactful changes to boost the flow of sales.

The open-source platform of WordPress allows implementing third-party API and plugins. In that case, even after a top-end evolution of the skilled community of WooCommerce developer third-party integration causes conflicts. So, a staging site is always the best option to resolve these issues with custom code.

Here, just take a look at the best ways to create a staging site for your existing Woocommerce site:

Included In Web Hosting Package

There is some managed hosting provider in WordPress, who includes the option of staging site creation with their hosting packages. Naturally, it is the most convenient way to create a staging site without giving any extra effort to clone file systems for managing own setup. Everything is a part of the included process.
Some potential WordPress managed hosting provider, who offers staging site as part of hosting packages are:

- Kinsta
- SiteGround
- WP Engine
- Pagely 

Exclusive Staging Solution 

While your web host provider does not offer staging as a part of its package you can opt a robust  WordPress staging solution named WP Stagecoach. This solution allows you to copy your existing WooCommerce site in one-click. It takes care of all the hassles of a database, DNS or PHP related messy arrangements.  Through this solution, you can select essentially the file and database which you want to import for bringing the changes in the live site. It scopes you to reverse the changes if the live site can’t run smoothly after imported file or database.

Usage Of Plugins

While the matter is related to WordPress, there are plenty of plugins to do everything, and it is also relevant for staging. Some useful cloning websites such as WP Staging, All-in-One Migration and Duplicator allow a WooCommerce developer to create staging sites for existing WordPress eCommerce site.

1. WP Staging

It is a user-friendly plugin to create a staging site with a couple of clicks and you can access it from the WordPress admin. It has a few easy steps to complete the whole process of staging.

- Find it from the plugin directory of WordPress.
- Install and activate.
- Select files, database, tables and login options, you want to add in your staging site.
- Click Start Cloning button. The process of staging site creation will be started.
- After finishing click Open Staging Site.
- Enter admin details of your site from a newly opened window to login staging site.

2. Duplicator

As a popular option of cloning, it scopes you to install and upload wherever you want to host the WordPress based staging site. Convenient steps to start the process:

- Install and activate duplicator.
- Duplicator > Packages > Create New
- Enter host and database details.

3. WP Migrate Pro
There some effective reasons, which makes WP Migrate DB Pro popular among the WooCommerce developer. It offers incredible and convenient ways which make migration easy and prompt. It scopes the developers to find out specific data and replace them in a serialised way. It also monitors the whole real-time process of migration.

Wrapping Up

Impactful changes always boost the overall flow of user-engagement for a profit-making WordPress based eStore site. So, a WooCommerce store developer always needs a few prompt ways to bring effective real-time changes through an experimental platform like staging site. For further suggestion, you can contact with the expert team of Australia based leading IT solution PHPProgrammers.

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