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Manchester Optimize Magento – By default Magento comes with enabled caching thus avoiding repetition of some of the heaviest operations. However, this is not always enough for Magento to run fast. Magento is a content management system that is commonly known to be performance intensive – this is primarily because it uses very heavy and complex database queries and is intended to be run on dedicated servers.
We have many users who run Magento on Cloud Sites platform with exceptional performance (try Litecraft Luxury Lights), but we have noticed some performance issues, particularly regarding larger stores on our system. The performance varies from store to store, and we recommend installing Magento with your own store data to test performance before going live.
In the meantime, we have had luck with a performance suggestions we’ve collected from their documentation and community, such as utilizing the Compilation module. Unfortunately these optimization techniques primarily affect the performance of the front-end and not the administrative panel, which can still be temperamental depending on the size of your store.
Manchester Optimize Magento – Cloud Sites Optimization Guide
The below are optimizations techniques we found to improve the performance of Magento installations on the Cloud Sites platform, which we have made available here for your convenience.
- Ensure Magento is installed and configured to use the file system instead of the database for storage
- Increase the memory limit in your .htaccess file. Varien recommends about 64M.
- Enable the Compilation module:
Within your administration panel, go to System -> Tools -> Compilation. Run the Compilation process. This may take a few times to complete – if you receive an error, log out, clear your browser cache, log back in and continue.
Improve Frontend cataloging:
- The Flat Catalog has two parts: Categories and Products
- Flat Categories are recommended for any Magento installation for improved performance, whereas the Flat
- Products is designed and recommended for catalogs that have over 1000 SKU’s.
To enable one or both, first go to the administration panel and navigate to System -> Cache Management. Under Catalog click on the Rebuild button next to Rebuild Flat Catalog Category or Product.
Note: If only Flat Catalog Categories are to be used there is no need to rebuild the Flat Catalog Product.
Navigate to System -> Configuration, click on Catalog and select the Frontend tab. Choose Yes next to the appropriate selection of either Use Flat Catalog Category or Product. Note: If you want to use only Flat Category there is no need to enable Flat Product.
Even with the above settings applied, the Compilation will need to be rerun whenever a significant change is made, and the Frontend Catalog will need to be rerun as well.
Manchester Optimize Magento – The Cloud Server Alternative
If the above settings are applied and there is still little to no improvement in your Magento performance, we strongly encourage you to migrate your Magento site to a Cloud Server, where Magento generally experiences the best performance. Varien (the software company that develops Magento) has a whitepaper on the configuration and optimization of MySQL and other server components for use with Magento, and also provides this optimization guide on their wiki.
Set up & Configure Robots.txt In Magento
Before we learn how to setup Robots.txt In Magento lets dig what it is. Well, Robots.txt (“robots dot txt”) is a text file that helps search engines like Google, Bing to understand what information on a particular site needed to be indexed. You can read more about robots.txt by clicking this link. Robots.txt is a critical file for the success of any store. Unfortunately, Magento Community and Magento Enterprise by default do not have robots.txt, so as a developer you have take the pain and create this file once.
Improving performance Using Robots.txt in Magento
There are certain areas where Robots.txt file can help, we are listing the 2 primary reasons of using Robots.txt file below:
- Robots.txt will help prevent duplicate content issue, one of the primary thing for SEO success.
- Robots.txt also help you to hide technical details about your site i.e. Error logs, SVN files, wanted directories etc. Since, these are prevented by Robots.txt you are left with clean URLs to be indexed in search engines.
Set Up Robots.txt in Magento Like A Pro
Before you setup Robots.txt file, you should know that robots.txt settings will only cover 1 domain at a time, so for multiple stores you have to create separate robots.txt files for each stores. Creating Robots.txt is super simple since it’s nothing but a text file and can be created using any text editors like dreamweaver, notepad, vim or your favorite code editor.
Once you have created Robots.txt file it is supposed to reside at root of your site. For an example if your store domain is www.mystore.com you should put robots.txt file under the domain root where you also have app directory. So it sits and accessed like www.yourstore.com/robots.txt. Please note that many search engines look for Robots.txt file directly under your store root and not under a directory. So keeping this file under any directory, sub-directory is not wise.
Robots.txt for Magento
Following is a well tested version of Robots.txt file which you can use, just edit the lines not applicable for your store’s set up.
[php]# # Robots.txt for Magento Community and Enterprise
# # GENERAL SETTINGS
# Enables robots.txt rules for all crawlers
User-agent: *
# # Crawl-delay parameter: the number of seconds you want to wait between successful requests to the same server.
# # Set a crawl rate, if your server’s traffic problems. Please note that Google ignore crawl-delay setting in Robots.txt. You can set up this in Google Webmaster tool
# Crawl-delay: 30
# # Magento sitemap: URL to your sitemap file in Magento
# Sitemap: http://www.mystore.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml
# # Settings that relate to the UNDER CONSTRUCTION
# # Do not allow indexing files and folders that are required during development:
# # CVS, SVN directory and dump files
Disallow: / CVS
Disallow: / *. Svn $
Disallow: / *. Idea $
Disallow: / *. Sql $
Disallow: / *. Tgz $
# # GENERAL SETTINGS For MAGENTO
# # Do not index the page Magento admin
Disallow: / admin /
# # Do not index the general technical Magento directory
Disallow: / app /
Disallow: / downloader /
Disallow: / errors /
Disallow: / includes /
Disallow: / lib /
Disallow: / pkginfo /
Disallow: / shell /
Disallow: / var /
# # Do not index the shared files Magento
Disallow: / api.php
Disallow: / cron.php
Disallow: / cron.sh
Disallow: / error_log
Disallow: / get.php
Disallow: / install.php
Disallow: / LICENSE.html
Disallow: / LICENSE.txt
Disallow: / LICENSE_AFL.txt
Disallow: / README.txt
Disallow: / RELEASE_NOTES.txt
# # MAGENTO SEA IMPROVEMENT
# # Do not index the page subcategories that are sorted or filtered.
Disallow: / *? Dir *
Disallow: / *? Dir = desc
Disallow: / *? Dir = asc
Disallow: / *? Limit = all
Disallow: / *? Mode *
# # Do not index the second copy of the home page
# # (example.com / index.php /). Un-comment only if
# # you have activated Magento SEO URLs.
# # Disallow: / index.php /
# # Do not index the link from the session ID
Disallow: / *? SID =
# # Do not index the page checkout and user account
Disallow: / checkout /
Disallow: / onestepcheckout /
Disallow: / customer /
Disallow: / customer / account /
Disallow: / customer / account / login /
# # Do not index the search page and CEO, non-optimized link categories
Disallow: / catalogsearch /
Disallow: / catalog / product_compare /
Disallow: / catalog / category / view /
Disallow: / catalog / product / view /
# # Server Settings
# # Do not index the general technical directories and files on a server
Disallow: / cgi-bin /
Disallow: / cleanup.php
Disallow: / apc.php
Disallow: / memcache.php
Disallow: / phpinfo.php
# # SETTINGS Image indexing
# # Optional: If you do not want to Google and Bing to index your images
# User-agent: Googlebot-Image
# Disallow: /
# User-agent: msnbot-media
# Disallow: /
#
[/php]