Mobecls tips: best Magento practices

Magento Page Speed optimization

Magento page speed can be optimized with Cloudflare. It caches and minimizes js/CSS/images and delivers the content from the nearest server.
Use Lesti_merge for Magento to merge JS via tags. That will make files smaller and faster.
Use Google PageSpeed module for Nginx and Apache. It can make pages 3 times faster.
Download: Google Page Speed module
Send data to analytics systems using GoogleTagManager. You won’t need to add extra code and it will help to cut page load time.
Let your developer remove ID from the cash key on category pages. It will allow to cache the same layout for all categories and will improve Magento speed.
You can use our extension for this: Same Layout Page Cache
Improve database speed by stopping unnecessary logs and reports with Yireo module. It will make database and website pages work faster.
Check the Ayasoftware_SimpleProductPricing method in the code and use native Magento method instead

Do not disable the extensions only at your Magento admin area because they will continue working without displaying. Disable them in app/etc/[modulename].xml.
Disable unnecessary URLs-rewrites in Magento and it will speed up your DB 4x times. Use Patch_index_URL by Agencedn’d.
Set Magento indexes in the mode Manual Update (except Price and Stock indexes). Run Reindex All 2-3 times per day via cron. It’ll make admin panel work faster.
Don’t look for a magic tool to track your performance. Just spent some time to adjust default Magento profiler to see SQL queries and use it to see the slowest block and queries on every page.

Use Sonassi as your hosting company because it offers MageStack (OS) built specially for Magento.
Use TripWire to get notifications about unauthorized changes on server.
Yotpo is one of the best services to add product reviews to Magento store but consider optimizing outbound requests for better performance.
Use Cache-Control HTTP header or CDN to manage pages caching on Magento store. It will improve website speed and cut the server load.
Cloudflare – not just a CDN service for Magento. It can be used as a geo-FPC if you handle pragma headers for the frontend. Remember to use Ajax for dynamic blocks – cart, welcome block.

Consider adding at least 1200 words on Magento landing pages for better SEO. The avg. length of top-10 articles increased to 1054 words in the last year.
Popular Magento SEO issue: duplicated products URLs. Set “No” at “Use Categories Path for Product URLs” in admin area and do reindex.
Do not use h1-h3 tags for titles in the navigation blocks (header, sidebars, footer). They should be used for the main text on your pages.
Adding Organization markup to all pages can be considered as spam. Add it only to the appropriate pages: main, Contacts, About Us.
Do not put a popup that covers main content on an entrance page. It can be considered as spam and will affect the page’s ranking.
Combine Disallow and Noindex directives in robots.txt to prevent pages appearing in search results.
Don’t forget to add https version of your Magento website to Google Search Console after migration. It treats http and https versions as separate websites.

Typical newcomers’ mistake: inner iFrame’s styles of some payment methods (ex. PayPal, Payone) cannot be changed. Take it into account before designing checkout page.

How often do you mistake live website and its staging? Simple lifehack: add another logo to a staging website to notice following live links immediately.
Use SoapUI for testing API errors on Magento
Don’t add Vendor folder to Git during Magento updates, use composer update on the staging instead.
If the changes in your custom theme suddenly stopped working, check the value of the option type of theme tab in the database. There should be 0 for the required theme.
Remove tabs log_*, catalog_product_index_price _* when creating a database backup for development installation.
Use Magmi for fast product import at Magento store with more than 10,000 products. Remember to secure it from external access.
Remember to enable error display for a Magento project on a local server with ini_set(‘display_errors’, 1); Fix those errors before they will appear at the production.

Magento AMP pages implementation: use Plumrocket for Magento 1.x and Google AMP extension for Magento 2.x.

If you hire Magento developer, choose an experienced one with at least 30$/h rate. Newbies will charge you less, but they can harm the store performance and security, disable update options or ruin the code architecture.