Magento is the most advanced and flexible eCommerce website development platform that needs no introduction today. Following the great flexibility and thousands of premium Magento extensions available for the user, Magento has is the world’s second most used platform for eCommerce development.

This platform offers every feature which an eCommerce website and the shoppers may look for; store management, customer service, customization, improving sales, feedback, rewards and more.

In today’s competitive eCommerce marketplace, you cannot afford to follow some development mistakes in your Magento store. It is essential to prioritize visitors along with adapting to modern needs of the web for the highest quality customer services. One single mistake can lead to performance issues that can have critical impact to the business.

Avoid these pitfalls in your Magento website development for putting your store on fastest selling wheel:

Shared Resources & Server

As I said before, Magento is a very flexible platform which comes with a feature to be shared with other stores and websites. However, it’s up to you if you really want to make the mistake as it’s going to reduce website’s loading speed and make it vulnerable to hackers’ attack. Bugs and virus may be easily transmitted to your store from any other website that you are sharing the hosting with.

Shared server is one of the major factors to influence your Magento store sales. If you want your eCommerce store from harm’s way, it can be customized to any other server and the most recommended ones are MySQL and PHP5.

Default Setting

Default Descriptions

Using default product descriptions not only reduces your SERPs, but also cuts professionalism from the designated customer services. For any online shopping store, product information and description is the most important part as visitors check descriptions first.

There may be some websites that sell products of other manufacturers and hence use the same descriptions. This has two side effects:

  • Descriptions may not be sales oriented.
  • Descriptions are considered copied by search engines.

This automatically reduces search engine ranking and puts you in the same crowd.

Default Home Page

Did you just visited a Magento online store only to find the Home title for Home Page? I bet it couldn’t make a better impression on your mind. When creating your own Magento store, make sure you follow the basics of SEO – integrate keywords on page descriptions.

This not only makes your store and pages more relevant to customers’ search, but also makes it search engine friendly.

Default Magento Sitemap (XML)

We all know the importance of sitemap. This helps your visitors to easily explore your website and find the right path to land at the relevant page. Sitemap also refer to search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing. Sitemap is quite popular these days and almost all developers know it, however a common problem is that many developers don’t add sitemap at eCommerce Magento website.

Layered Navigation Problem

Well, this is something that almost every visitor loves. Layered navigation refers to different options available on one page. Multiple categories care aligned on one page in layered navigation, which allows visitors to select their desired options.

Overlapped categories, obscured images, and very slow loading speed are the common issues that occur in layered navigation. If visitors have to come across any of the said issue at your store, they’ll choose better to move to another website.

Layered navigation issues can be resolved using the following ways:

  • Don’t allow Search Engines to crawl through your pages.
  • Use Ajax navigation to filter the products.

Non-Responsive Website

With billions of people using smartphones today, you can’t ignore these compact devices while developing a Magento website. Also Google has recently announced that no website without responsive design can rank better on search engines.

Responsive design automatically adjusts to all screen sizes and performs better on all devices including smartphone, tablet and desktop. A non-responsive website can drop your sales to ocean bottoms. When planning to integrate more feature to your website, make sure you’re getting only premium Magento extensions that are responsive.

If your Magento store is facing performance issues and unable to attract more visitors and if you are planning to develop another website from scratch, then consider checking these mistakes as a few minor modifications can help boost your online sales to surprising numbers