Best Practices for Magento Data Management

Best Practices for Magento Data Management
July 19, 2019 Mike McLeland

Best Practices for Magento Data Management

Anyone who has bought or browsed a product on a website will tell you that one of the most annoying features is a slow loading page. If customers want to buy shorts and find that category, once they click on it they would like to rapidly see the catalog of choices brought up. But how long are they willing to wait? We are so accustomed to fast response time that even waiting 10 seconds can feel like an eternity.

Many factors can contribute to slower load time. Some of it, naturally, is the speed of their connection. Most people won’t blame the website owner for that, but there are factors that the website owner can control. One of these involves data management.

Why Should Data Be Managed?

When discussing data management this does not mean that you should pick and choose which parts of your inventory or catalog you display on your site. If you cannot put your entire inventory on your website you will lose sales and after all, sales is the point of eCommerce. Magento is an excellent platform for eCommerce and offers many tools and options to keep your site running smoothly.

So why do you have to manage your data? The reason is that storing data that you do not need to actually run your business takes up space on your server. As you take up space, eventually your system runs more slowly. This leads to slower page load times as mentioned above.

What Data Should Be Managed?

Magento maintains log files that record information about your site, such as what products your customers have browsed or which products were compared. Magento performs these tasks for you automatically. What this does do is give you the ability to create statistical reports from the data. Unfortunately, what this also does is create a huge amount of data that is stored on your server and which inevitably slows it down.

What Magento also has is an option that will clean these log files for you though by default it is turned off. If you turn it on you can choose the log files you want to clean and the frequency with which you want Magento to do it. There is some data you may want to keep for a quarter to see how a new product is received, for example, while there may be other data you don’t care about at all.

If you are a little skittish about deleting data yourself or choosing the deletion options, give North Texas Web Design a call. We specialize in designing and optimizing websites and would be happy to help you out.

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Mike McLeland
Owner – North Texas Web Design

Richard Taveira
WordPress GURU & Specialist