How To Fix The Most Common Problems In Magento?

Magento, the most popular e-commerce development platform is not left with errors or mistakes that you can potentially make. Running an e-commerce store on Magento gives you many benefits but on the same side, you have to make sure that you are not making any errors on it. In this article, we will be going through some major errors that you must resolve. Let’s begin…

1. Configuring Magento to work with a new domain

There are two major steps to configure Magento to work with a new domain

Magento Database Settings
In the Site Tools, navigate to phpMyAdmin. In the left menu, there will be a Magento database which you have to select. After selecting the database, find this table core_config_data and then select it. You have to edit the first two fields in this. Click on Browse.

web/unsecure/base_url
web/secure/base_url

Replace the old domain with the new domain and for saving the changes, click on the Go button.

Clear the Cache
You can eliminate many Magento issues just by clearing the Cache. Many changes that you have made will not work or reflect in the frontend if you haven’t cleared the cache. For clearing the cache, you have to navigate into the Magento Installation directory > /var/cache. Just delete this folder.

2. Resetting Magento Admin Password

For changing the admin password of your Magento store, you have to navigate into Site Tools > Site >MySQL > phpMyAdmin. Select the database, click on the SQL and then paste this query:

UPDATE admin_user SET password = CONCAT(SHA2("XXXXXYourNewPassword", 256),":XXXXX:1") WHERE username = "YourAdminUser";

You have to also change your existing password with the new password in YourNewPassword. Also, change YourAdminUser to your Magento admin username. You can replace XXXX sequence with any random characters. Click on Go and the password will get changed.

3. Setting SEO optimized URLs in Magento

To optimize your Magento store so that it will get a place in the top Search Engine Results Pages, you have to make the URLs of the products pages and other pages search engine friendly. For this, login into the Magento Admin Panel and navigate to Stores > Settings > Configuration. In the General tab, switch to Web from the sub-navigation panel on the left.

Then, navigate to Search Engine Optimization. There will be an option in the drop-down named Use Web Server Rewrites, which you have to choose Yes. Click on the Save Config button and the Magento SEF URLs will get enabled.

4. Optimizing the Speed of Your Magento Store

Do you know that if your e-commerce store takes more than 3 seconds to load then 53% of the customers will leave your site and approach your competitors?

Although there are many detailed ways of optimizing the speed of your Magento, we will be giving you a brief idea of how you can optimizing the speed.

For optimizing the JS & CSS, navigate to Stores > Configuration in Settings Section. Then you have to navigate to Developer in Advanced Tab > JS Settings. In the options of Enable JS Bundling, Merge JS Files, and Minify JS Files, click on Yes.

For merging the CSS files, navigate to Stores > Configuration in Settings Section > Developer in Advanced Tab again, expand the CSS section. Now you can select yes for Merge CSS Files & Minify CSS Files.

5. Redirecting Magento Store through www

For many different scenarios such as for SEO & usability, you may want to direct the traffic to your store only through http://www.yourdomainname .com

For this, you have to open the .htaccess file in the folder where the Magento is located. In this file, find the RewriteEngine on line and then add these lines:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

After doing this, save this file. Thereafter, you have to login in to the Magento admin panel and navigate to Stores > Configuration menu in the Settings action. Expand the General menu from the left panel and click on the Web button.

You have to unfold the Base URLs and Base Secure URLs and change them from http://yourdomainname .com to http://www.yourdomainname .com.
After saving these changes, the Magento store will start working with www.yourdomainname .com only.

6. Disabling the Compare Products Feature in Magento

Many customers on an e-commerce stores get confuse and frustrated with the compare products functionality. Thus, it is better to disable this functionality. For disabling it, you have to first edit theapp/design/frontend/Venustheme/fasony/Magento_Catalog/templates/product/list.phtml file and then remove this code:

<?php compareHelper = $this->helper('Magento\Catalog\Helper\Product\Compare'); ?> <a href="#" class="action tocompare" title="<?php echo $block->escapeHtml(__('Add to Compare')); ?>" aria-label="<?php echo $block->escapeHtml(__('Add to Compare')); ?>" data-post='<?php /* [@escapeNotVerified](/escapeNotVerified) */ echo $compareHelper->getPostDataParams($_product); ?>' role="button"> <?php /* [@escapeNotVerified](/escapeNotVerified) */ echo __('<i class="fa fa-refresh"> </i>') ?>

7. Setting Up a Blog in Magento Store

By setting up a blog in the Magento store, you give your store customers another point of interaction and can also improve the SEO of your e-commerce site by adding relevant keywords. In Magento, it is quite to set up a blog section. However, this is not a default functionality in Magento, and you may require a 3rd party extension to set it up. Go through the Magento Marketplace, and find an extension that can perfectly meet your requirements.

8. Adding Contact Form in the Magento Store

The Contact Form functionality in the Magento store comes by default. You can find a link to the contact form in the footer of your Magento installation. Obviously, you can add a contact form on any page. You just have to login into the admin panel of your Magento store and
then go to >Content > Pages. Create a new page or select the page where you want to add a contact form. Paste this code in the HTML option of WYSIWYG editor in the Content block:

{{block type='core/template' name='contactForm' template='contacts/form.phtml'}}

9. Fixing Access Denied Issue

There may be some components in the Admin Panel that you may not be able to access. To access these, firstly try to login again ( as you must have been timed out).

If this doesn’t work, then reset the admin privileges. You can do this by navigating to Magento Admin Panel > System > Permissions > User Roles.

Click on the Role Resources option from the left menu and make sure that Resources Access has been set to All.

Clicking On Save Role will set the permissions.

10. Creating a custom group of users

You can create a new group of users in the Magento Admin. You have to navigate into Stores > Other Settings section > Customer groups > Add New Customer Group.

When the customer register at your e-commerce store, you can change the customer’s group from the Magento Admin panel. Check Customers > All Customers. Click on the Edit link next to the customer you want to edit and then change the group from the Account Information > Group. Change the group from the drop and then click on Save Customer.

Wrapping Up

In this article, we have gone through several errors and steps that you must implement in your Magento store. If you do not have the technical expertise then getting assistance from a Magento development company is a good idea. With experience and technical knowledge, a Magento developer can provide maintenance & support to a Magento store, and also help you create an e-commerce store from scratch.