Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce development platforms across the world. With Magento, it is quite easy to set up an e-commerce store and then customizes as per your requirements. When you take your store online it must meet the requirements of your products and industry niche. There must be excellent customer service options with user-friendly nature and errors free. Any error in Magento setup, installation or maintenance can affect the whole e-commerce store along with its speed and responsiveness. A simple error can even make you lose the trust of your customers. Thus, it is highly important to make sure that your Magento store is error-free.
Obviously, there must be some occasional errors that will be getting resolved in the ongoing maintenance. But for that, it is important that you have a team or you have hired a Magento development company to take care of the maintenance responsibilities. In this article, we will be discussing the important or potential errors in Magento 2 that you must avoid.
Harmful Errors in Magento 2:
There are many common errors that can arise while using Magento 2. As Magento releases its newer versions, new challenges are always in the queue. These errors must get resolved before they turn into a big blunder. It is quite easy to avoid these errors by following some proper steps during the purchase and installing the extensions. Let’s discuss each issue in detail:
· Compatibility of the extension:
It is essential to check whether the extension that you are buying or installing is compatible with your current Magento version or not. Also, whether the extension provides support for better versions or not. There are many extensions which can support Magento 1 version but not the Magento 2.
It is important as you don’t want to waste your money or have a constant worry of not having the extension work and now you have to purchase another one. It may initially seem so absurd but this is actually a common mistake. Do double-check before using a paid extension.
· Installation:
It is mandatory that you must follow the correct steps which you will get in the guide of the extension. Following those steps will result in a hassle-free extension and can answer any troubleshooting issues which may have been arisen.
· Download the latest version:
Many Magento extensions come with different versions. Thus, the best practice is to download the latest version as it will include all the best features.
· Clear Cache:
It is a great idea to clear the cache so that nothing will interfere with the extension. For doing this, you have to open the cache management settings in the Admin Panel, and then clear the cache.
· Check functionality:
It is imperative to check the functionality and usage of an extension before purchasing or installing an extension in Magento 2. It must be meeting your requirements.
Installation issues in Magento 2:
· System Requirements:
You have to take the double-check whether you are meeting all the system requirements for Magento 2. Don’t wait to first download and then trying for the installation.
· Copy extensions to the correct folder:
It is important that the downloaded extension must be placed in a correct folder before trying for installation. If the extension wouldn’t be in the proper folder in your system, then it may not get installed or behave properly.
SEO Issues with Magento 2 Extensions:
If there wouldn’t be any traffic on your site, then there will be no sales at all. For bringing traffic on the site, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a vital role. It is an important factor to consider when you are adding content, images, videos, etc. in your store. SEO will help you to get search engine ranking for your relevant keywords which will increase the discoverability of your store.
You will get many SEO improvements with Magento 2. However, on the same side, you may do many errors as well. This can hurt the SEO of your website. Here are some of the SEO mistakes that you must avoid in your Magento store:
1. Forgetting to change default meta tags:
If you are new in Magento then you must forget the default meta tags of your e-commerce store. This will impact the product rankings on the search result pages. The default title tags & meta descriptions are not optimized for the search engines. It is because there are no targeted keywords in them.
For improving the SEO ranking, it is better to add relevant keyword phrases within the title tags or meta descriptions. Create unique, engaging, and SEO friendly meta descriptions for your product pages.
2. Not using alt tags:
You can’t get higher rankings on SERPs without SEO optimized product images. All the beautiful, relevant, and high-quality images will go in vain if they are not SEO optimized. The search engines can’t determine what are your images about if you don’t tell about them. Thus, add the alt tags on the images. It will improve the visibility of the images on Google and other search engine platforms.
People will be able to find your e-commerce store by the relevant, user-friendly, and SEO-friendly tags on the images.
3. Don’t use non-descriptive URLs:
Many people make mistakes using non-descriptive URLs when they are optimizing their e-commerce store. Adding descriptive URLs is important as it will optimize the URLs of the pages. Thus the search engine will crawl it and index the site quickly and easily.
Add relevant keywords in your site URLs for indexing the web store. If you want to drive more web customers towards your store, make sure you create readable, engaging, and search-engine friendly URLs. Adding a product number in the site URL makes it non-descriptive. Instead, adding relevant content & user-friendly URLs will be descriptive. Let’s take an example if you are selling trousers on your site, then the product URL must be like this:
example.com/product/men-casual-trousers
4. Ignoring the staging server after making the changes on Production site:
If you already have a website then you must know about the staging server. A staging server is used during the development to test the changes that the developers make. As it is always risky to make changes on the live site, it is always better to use a staging environment. If anything goes south, it will be on staging and there would be no effect on the live site. Add noindex/nofollow attributes by making use of the meta tag before you begin using the staging server. It will limit the site from getting indexed by search engine crawlers.
5. Forgetting to change the robots.txt file:
Many store owners forget to tweak the robots.txt file and meta robots directives after the staging phase. This restricts the search engines to crawl and index the e-commerce store. You must avoid this mistake by checking the robots.txt file and meta robots directives.
You can find them in the <head> section of each web page. Make sure to set them to INDEX, FOLLOW by default. You can also check the same by:
Accessing your System → Configuration → General → Design → HTML Head → Default robots.
6. Ignoring rel=canonical:
Canonical tags can help you in resolving the issues of duplicate content. It is highly required if you are running an e-commerce store with hundreds or thousands of products pages. In fact, many online stores have URLs containing non-descriptive elements like ?=, p=7.
Well, these are actually the duplicate pages that shouldn’t be crawl by Google. Use rel=canonical for eliminating this situation. It can limit the indexing of the duplicated pages and the search engine will index only the fresh page.
7. Using duplicate content:
Every search engine loves fresh, unique, and quality content. Thus make sure that you are not using the duplicate content for product description, blog page, site content, etc. Many sellers make the mistake of using the same content as of manufacturers in their product descriptions. You can’t do this in the e-commerce industry. The search engine will not help you to get visibility for the products with duplicate product descriptions on the site.
Wrapping Up:
In this article, we have gone through several mistakes that are knowingly or unknowingly get done by online merchants. However, if you want to focus on the business strategies instead of these technical issues then you must hire a Magento development company like us. We can help you in the ongoing maintenance of your e-commerce store as well as develop a new Magento from scratch. Let us know your requirements.
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