5 Common Magento Ecommerce Store Problems & Their Solutions
- By Anup Mehrotra
- 16-02-2022
- E-commerce
Magento is one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available in the market. It comes with some out-of-the-box functionalities and features that other platforms do not provide and that's the reason it powers 12% of all stores on the web.
However, with amazing functionality comes complexities. At times, Magento is hard to handle and you may encounter issues that require experts' insights and focus. If you do not want these issues to impact your bottom line, you must be aware of their potential causes and solutions.
The good news here is that every problem in Magento has a solution and you just need the right way to implement it. In this article, we are going to list some common Magento problems that business owners face along with their solutions. So, let's get started.
1) Slow Website Speed
Speed is one of the most important factors search engines take into consideration when ranking eCommerce stores. Also, if your store takes more than 3 seconds to load, customers will leave it right away. However, speed optimization is a common problem with all eCommerce stores, and here are the solutions:
Optimize JS and CSS: If you have heavy JavaScript and CSS on your website, it may cause problems for you especially if you are using POS on the frontend. Thus, make sure you optimize it with the help of eCommerce developers. They may suggest you to reduce the number of JS and CSS lines by merging to optimize space, resulting in improved speed.
Keep Your Magento Version Updated: With every release of a new Magento version, you get to see improvements in performance, fixed issues, and security patches. So, it is crucial to update your store from time to time in order to keep your store's performance high.
2) SEO Problems
Your online store's SEO directly impacts the visibility of your business online. Thus, you can not compromise with SEO best practices and solutions. However, retailers often find it hard to solve SEO problems if they are not aware of search engine algorithms or do not have an eCommerce marketing agency to help them. Here are some of these errors:
Missing ALT Tags: To enable search engines to find and rank your product images, ALT tags are crucial and retailers sometimes do not know about this common practice which results in decreased visibility. Remember, there is no benefit of using beautiful product images on your website if they are not search engine optimized.
Bad URL Structure: Your URL is the next factor that impacts your store's visibility. If your URL is not descriptive enough, search engines won't be able to understand it and they will not rank it for relevant keywords. It will result in customers never finding your product pages and loss of sales.
Not Making the Use of Rel=Canonical Tag: An eCommerce website has several similar product pages. Thus, their content is also similar. But, having multiple pages with similar content is another bad SEO practice. But, it has a solution. Retailers can make use of the rel=canonical tag to tell search engines which page is duplicate and not crawlable.
3) Making Use of Incompatible Extensions or Plug-Ins
Magento is a highly customizable platform. Thus, retailers often make use of several third-party tools or extensions to enhance their store functionality and grow sales. But, sometimes they end up installing the wrong extensions that are either incompatible with the store or do not perform the intended function well but disturb the overall store functionality.
Thus, retailers must pay attention while buying an extension and must install/test them properly to avoid any hassles later on.
4) Invisible Products
Imagine some of the products on your Magento store disappear without any warning. Wouldn't it be disheartening?
It happens but it also has a solution. To commence with, make sure you check your inventory properly to see whether the products are in-stock or not. Also, check whether you have listed products in the right category if you uploaded them manually. Another cause of this problem might be cache. So, get rid of indexes and caches that are outdated.
5) Not Enabling Developer Mode
To run a Magento store successfully, you will have to make changes in your customer experience and offerings from time to time. Or, you may require to install some additional features to enhance your store functionality.
When doing all of that, you must switch to Magento developer mode or maintenance mode to notify your customer and eliminate any interruptions. Not switching to developer mode can cause a bad customer experience which may result in deteriorating brand reputation and high customer churn rate.
Wrapping Up
In this blog, we discussed several common problems that you might face while running a Magento store. But, dealing with these issues can be troublesome for a retailer. Thus, it is best to work with a Magento development agency from the very beginning to avoid these issues or solve them effectively. By having the experts by your side, you can not just avoid errors but improve your revenue by many folds.