20 Pre-launch Things That You Should Do While Launching Your Magento Site
As a
developer, launching a website can be a difficult task as you have to
take care of various things in mind.
There are a lot of people, who think
that they might have everything under
control, but
in your mind, you are well aware that there will be some
things that you can miss out. Your planned project will fall in
melancholy when that happens with you.
To
make matters a lot simpler for you, I have listed a complete list of
pre-launch things that every single Magento develop should do while
launching their Magento website.
It will be a great choice for us if
we keep this comprehensive list
on every Magento developers’ desk.
By
following this list, you can easily launch your Magento website
successfully and get enormous benefits. Without taking your
more time, we can have a look at 20 pre-launch things to do
while launching Magento website:
The
most important thing that you need to perform for Magento SEO is to
alter the settings of your Magento HTML head.
One can easily change the title,
meta description and review the keywords for the SEO when you
navigate to System>Configuration>General>Design>HTML
Head.
Base
URLs are those URLs that are stored in the database table
core_config_data,
but all those URLs can be easily
entranced through the admin interface if you have access to
it: System→ Configuration → Web. While moving the website, URLs
need to be updated else all the URLs will be referring back to the
staging site.
Favicon –
Sometimes,
Magento can be a tricky chore, but it doesn’t
mean that you can get left with making a fool out of yourself
by forgetting to develop a favicon.
Inserting the Right Store Information –
You
can easily find and alter your store’s information in
System>Configuration>General>Store Information. By going to
System>Configuration>Store Email Addresses, you
are able to change the email address of your store.
Inserting Product Placeholder Images –
For
products and catalogues, Magento comes with default placeholder
pictures. The placeholder images will be shown by default when there
is no image given to your product.
You are permitted to upload your own
Product Placeholder images by going to
System>Configuration>Catalog>Product Image Placeholders.
Inserting the Right Store Information –
Now,
it becomes easily possible for you to search and change your store
information in System>Configuration>General>Store
Information. You are also capable of changing the email address of
your store by going to System>Configuration>Store Email
Addresses.
Altering the Admin URL –
It is
also good for you to change the URL of your admin page for security
reasons. Through
admin panel, you can also change your Admin URL. Just go
through this Go to System>Configuration>Advanced>Admin Admin
Base URL. You
are also capable of choosing the utmost protection for your store
and select a strong username and password for the admin.
Setting Up The Tax Rules –
Various
possibilities and choices are designed by Magento in order to deal
with the difficult processes of taxation. However, classes of product
taxes chosen to a particular product by the
proprietor. People
can also set the tax percentage as resolute by the particular
region, country, state of your customer.
Make
sure you recheck it to charge whether you have missed something in
the development period before you go live.
Furthermore, you can easily find the
tax settings in System>Configuration>Sales>Tax.
Completing the Layout of 404 Error Page –
You do
not have to misjudge the capabilities of a 404 error page as you can
make use of it to put some categories by editing the layout of the
page. By navigating to CMS>Pages>404 Page, you can easily do
it.
Transactional Emails –
When
it comes to talking about transactional emails,
they are popular for using a sole
logo to the
default one. Ensure
that the image which you wanted to use is saved in your theme
directory as logo_email.gif.
Maximum
number of emails will be sorted easily because of using the
configuration, which you have already set.
Although, a lot of templates, which
as of version 1.4.1.1, are making use of hard coded values,
so it is important to go in to these and make some of the
changes. Below, you can find email templates that are affected:
- Newsletter subscription confirmation - "Demo Store"
- New account confirmation key - "Demo Store"
- New password - "Demo Store"
- Share Wishlist - "Demo Store"
- New Order - "PST"
Plain-text Passwords in Emails are Considered as Evil
Whenever
any website send out plain-text passwords in emails, it really cramps
me out. Magento
is doing this whenever you sign-up for
an account. Consequently, it is recommended to go into the
transaction email for account confirmation and restore the password
with some holding text like “****”.
It is
better to alter the URL, which the admin interface resides on for
security purpose. It can be easily changed in the app/etx/local.xml
file. For the admin router, you can see admin defined as the
frontname. Before you visit your new admin URL, delete cache.
Keeping CSS in a Single File –
It is
quite similar to the JavaScript task. However, it is an experimental
one, so it is must to take safeguard before finishing
this task. Before you put the website live to see, one option
is to power on the staging server if this task has any of
side-effects. It can be easily done by just going to
System>Configuration>Developer>CSS Setting.
Bring JavaScript Into One File –
You
should limit the amount of HTTP requests, which are developed every
time as this way you can reduce the loading time of the
webpages. One
can easily do this by just flushing JavaScript file into a
single file: System>Configuration>Developer>Settings.
Tax Settings –
All
these must be set up already; however, it
doesn’t hurt to see if anything in the
configuration was unnoticed. These can be found in System→
Configuration → Sales → Tax and also Sales → Tax.
Invoice and Packing Slip Design –
It is
important for you to upload the logo that can
be used for invoices. Rather,
you can place logo_email.gif in your images folder in the skin
directory. However, some of the other settings are there as
well that you should pay attention to.
Possibly,
you did not bother with managing stock when importing products the
first time around.
At the time of developing, it is an
unnecessary hassle. You
can also check with your client what configuration he would like set
up before you go live.
With stock levels before going live,
you may require to do another product import.
At the
time of developing, caching is disabled at the
commencement. Once
you done with it, it is essential that you remember to
re-enable the caching again and revive it while you are prepared for
show time.
There
are numerous extended settings, which are obtainable if you want to
use Google Webmaster Tool only for producing
the sitemap, which regulates itself. These are found in System
> Configuration > Catalog > Google Sitemaps.
It is
essential for you to ensure that your payment gateway must be ready
to move your website from testing to live.
If you do not set this accurately,
it will result in monetary losses.
Clearing Log –
The logs that obtainable in the database spread out with time. In order to remove logs from admin in a specific manner, you can go to System>Configuration>Advanced>System>Log cleaning. You need to enable it and you also need to remove all those logs frequently.
So,
these are the 20 pre-launch things that you should do while launching
your Magento website. By keeping these things
in mind, you can start on a perfect website to expand your
business worldwide.
In
case, if you are finding difficulty in fixing all these things in
your Magento website, you can hire a professional Magento developer, who has adept in designing and developing Magento
based website. Get in touch with us by filing an
instant quote form and we will get back to you within 24
hours!