Why Magento Upgrade?

Magento Keep on working and releasing the versions frequently. whenever we recommend people to upgrade the Magento to latest version, the first question is “Why do we need to upgrade the Magento”. what is the purpose of upgrading Magento. if you take any ecommerce not only ecommerce any software it always good to keep update to latest version.

In this article we will see why Magento version upgrade is very ant for the store owner.

• In every release Magento introduce new features, bug fixing.
• By upgrading Magento to latest version, we can make our store more secured from online vulnerabilities, hackers and malwares.
• Improved features and functionalities will help to improve the sales.
• With the help of new versions we can able to install more number of modules. some of the module may not support for the old version.
• We can get more advantages of Magento Extensions.
• We can get more flexibility and control over the system.
• Latest version will come up with the performance improvement. so it helps to improve the sale.
• Magento’s latest version will come up with the responsive design. so we can get more Customer from mobile devices. it improve the sales.

Why do we need to upgrade Magento 1.14.2
Magento 1.14.2 comes with lots of New features and functionality
Magento 1.14.2 includes the latest version of Zend Framework 1 and also comes with the Redis cache integration. It also servers Full Page cache in most of the pages. it improve the product quality and it adds the previous patches in to the core code.

New Features

Google Tag Manager:
Google Tag Manager tools is used to track many tags, snippets of code that are related to marketing campaign event. we can use google tag manager to track audience measurement, personalization, retargeting and search engine marketing.

Universal Analytics with Enhanced E-Commerce:
Enhanced E-Commerce is a plugin for google universal analytics with checkout funnel visualization and segmentation tools.  with the help of this tool we can able to track customers shopping behaviour that includes,

Products sales revenue
Performance of product positioning
Banner view and click data

Enhancements to the existing features:
Visual Merchandiser :
Visual merchandiser is updated to new automatic sorting features which helps to store owner to bring the following products in to the top.

• Best Sellers
• Sort by color
• Newest products
• lowest stock item
• highest margin items

Google Shopping:
Google shopping is a google adwords service that publish product feeds from merchant web catalogs. The Google API configuration now includes different section for google shopping.

Magento 1.14.2 has lots of performance and security improvements. for more details please refer the Magneto 1.14.2 Release notes.

Reference : http://www.mohannatarajan.com/magento/why-do-we-need-to-upgrade-magento-to-latest-version

How to Speed up Magento E-Commerce Store

Speed up the Magento store is always the challenging one. Everyone know to set the configuration in magento backend to optimize the site. apart from that we need to follow the below Hosting Environments and some other general tips.

First we should host the site in Dedicated server
Host the site in your customer country
Go to Mysql Admin Manager and Repair all the tables and Optimize the table
Only Install necessary Apache modules
use apache mod_expires and be sure to set how long the files should be cached.
Enable Gzip Compression in your htaccess file
Use Content Delivery Network(CDN) for a static content. like css,js,images
Please try to avoid external javascript and Iframe. Because every DNS lookup takes extra time.
Enable Apache KeepAlives.
Must Enable the Compilation mode in your Magento admin
Minimize the http redirects
Make your output should be W3C validated. because Errors may slowdown the browser
Turn off your Web server logs, it reduces the disk writes.
Try to Update the magento to latest version.
Increase the Query cache size in your Mysql Server
Set php_value_memory_limit to 128M in your php configuration to ensure we don't run out of memory.
Use Different server for Magento Application and MySQL.
Use Load Balancer to avoid the down time when more number of hits in the site.
If your site heavily crawled by the search engines, then you can tweak your robots.txt.
Ref: http://www.byte.nl/blog/magento-robots-txt/
Minimize the js and css files
specify the image dimensions for your images
try to Implement anyone of the cache like APC,Varnish,etc...
try to go with some other third party booster module like AITOC Magento Booster, Nitrogento