10 Magento Valentine's Day Ideas | Love your Website

Stuck for what to get your loved one this Valentine’s Day? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Here’s 10 Magento Valentine’s Day ideas to show your website some love.

Roses are red, Violets are blue, we love Magento, here’s how you can too.

1. Update Modules

Outdated modules can often be the source of attacks on your web store. You only have to take a look at the past few months and there have been several high-profile vulnerabilities discovered in some of the more popular plugins.

This is going to be a manual process since; unfortunately, (and this is a bug-bearer of ours here at iWeb) there’s no centralised tool that lists Plugin Versions and sometimes plugin vendors don’t actually publish change logs too!

How to find what version of a plugin you are using:

Magento 1:
Take a look at your install of Magento and look in app/code/{community or local}/{module_vendor}/{module_name}/etc/config.xml. Look inside the <version> tag.

Magento 2:
Check the modules module.xml and/or composer files.

2. Mage Report

Mage Report is a great tool; if you’re not aware of it already – visit it at www.magereport.com and enter your site URL into it and it will do a scan of your website and identify any missed security patches and some (known) plugin vulnerabilities and tell you if your site is protected or not.

Surveys taken in 2015 suggest that some 80% of Magento stores at the time were unpatched. Don’t let your site become a statistic for the next survey!

3. Remove Admin users / Change Passwords

It’s always a good idea to keep on-top of this one. Take a look in your Magento Admin under:

System > Permissions > Users

And then make sure that everyone who has administrator accounts on your store should still have them. Remove any unwanted logins and whilst you’re there; why not change the passwords on some of the active ones.

4. Cleanup API Users

This won’t help with performance; but will help ensure you Magento store stays secure. Take a look in the API section of your store under the following menu option:

System > Web Services > SOAP/XML-RPC – Users

Check that everyone who you have given access too still requires access and remove any unwanted API users.

5. Remove Unwanted Images (IMA Clean plugin)

Magento can often get bloated with old / unused images; use an image clean plugin (M1 / M2) to scan for unused images in your Magento store and get them removed and save some precious hard-disk space.

6. Stock Management (remove old products)

Take a look through your catalog and identify any products you will no longer be stocking and remove these products. This will reduce you database size, speed up indexing and make browsing your products grid faster.

7. Remove Unused Customer Groups (these slow down indexing)

Customer groups are a great feature in Magento. But did you know; that every time you create a new customer Magento (depending on your stock setup) may have to index every single price for that customer group.

Imagine if you had 2000 products and 1 customer group… it would create 2000 index rows. Now imagine you had 2000 products and 100 customer groups… we’re now looking at 200,000 index rows – which is going to take some time!

Take a look under the following menu option in your admin and remove any unwanted / old customer groups.

Customers > Customer Groups

8. Remove Unwanted / Old Coupon Codes

If you use coupon codes or any form of discount rule within Magento; you might want to take a look at them and remove any old /redundant ones.

As with customer groups, having large amounts of these can bloat your stores indexes and greatly reduce performance.

9. Unwanted Plugins

Many sites have plugins installed that have fell by the way-side and become otherwise redundant. It is a good idea to get these properly uninstalled and removed from the code-base completely since extensions can slow down your web store.

Did you know
Even if you have a plugin set to disabled in the admin – all of its code still executes – it is just the “output” of the plugin that is disabled.