Manage Your Magento Store
As a pretty intricate piece of software mounted on or, if you wish, put into a chunk of no less sophisticated hardware, a Magento-based store has to be carefully looked after for bugs and other technical problems that can kill sales and at times endanger your whole online business. Another important issue is the effective organization of the trade. You have to make sure that the work is done by those who can do it best and that you can quickly spot any negative effects if something goes wrong.
For your Magento to run smoothly you have to proactively address several important questions.
Backups
First of all, you must back up your online store. This is a kind of silver bullet against the harshest odds. You may migrate your store to a more powerful server if the current one isn't coping, you may hire a specialist who will fix some Magento functionality problems – but if there is no backup for your store, you can lose all your business in a blink. If your store is large, restoring it to its previous scale can take quite some time. That is why you need your backup to be properly done and constantly updated. The best solution for your backups would be a separate server (or even better – several servers) coupled with passive data storage media (a hard disk kept in a lock box to which your backup is copied weekly).
What do you have to backup first of all? With Magento, the essential elements are the source code and the database. These will be enough to restore your store successfully. But if you want to minimize the inevitable downtime caused by the crash and restoration work, you have to back up your operating system as well.
It will be also quite useful to conduct some Magento restoration drills in order to be quick in case of real emergency.
Staging Installation
Another must-have is a Magento staging installation or a separate staging server. It has to be an exact copy of your live store. Any changes you introduce to your Magento and Magento-compatible software have to be tested on your staging installation first. Changes don't always work right off the bat and that means bugs or even unintended downtime, which is no good for your sales and customer appeal. Perhaps it would be enough just to create a staging copy of your source code and database, but a separate server will be the best solution: the one that is a complete copy of your live server both in terms of software and hardware.
Monitor Server Load
Server overload can dramatically worsen your Magento store's performance and be really disastrous for your sales. This is why it is wise to closely monitor your server load and carry out timely logs analysis. The server subsystems you have to monitor are: processor, memory, hard disk and network subsystem. Overload of any of these systems can take down the whole server with the unstable work of your online store as the result. As your store grows in popularity and gets more traffic, your server load grows. Monitoring it will show you when it is time to upgrade your hardware. AITOC offers a free server monitoring system, Server Load Monitor, which lets you easily track your server performance.
Assign Proper Permissions
Managing a Magento store is often done by different people with different qualifications. If your employee's task is to just process orders, it might be quite risky to let him tamper with delicate software settings. Magento allows for some degree of access rights separation, but for more flexibility and integrity you may consider Advanced Permissions. This Magento extension enables admin to assign permissions to back-end users for editing products, managing product categories, managing orders, design and configurations within specific catalogs, Magento store views and websites.
Be Notified About Events in Your Store
Even when your store is properly set up and well organized, there are problems that arise quite unexpectedly. If they are addressed promptly, they won't cause much trouble. To be immediately notified about problems in your store you may use Magento WatchDog extension. It will promptly alert you about malfunctions in your Magento store and provide you with the information needed to fix those malfunctions faster (such as when, where and in what circumstances the errors occur). Being up-to-date on non-catastrophic events in your store (such as new orders, change of order status, new customer registrations, new reviews and new tags, etc.) will certainly help you manage your store. Admin E-mail Notifications serves this purpose quite well.
We hope that following these recommendations will save you a lot of time, money and nerve cells while managing your Magento store.
What are your specific requirements for your online store administration? What technical problems have you encountered? Please share in comments below.
source: aitoc
