Magento is right now the most complete and fully featured e-commerce system in our opinion, but unfortunately this does come at a price in performance. Whereas osCommerce, Zencart, CRE Loaded and Virtuemart all perform quite well out of the box, Magento seems slow in comparison. You could say this is a price worth paying for the additional features, but with some steps which we will go into here you will be able to make your Magento store much faster.

We’ll fully explain each tweak and the steps you need to go through to implement these on our hosting, these are all tweaks that you can do yourself without having to contact your hosting company, at least on the NetHosted Platform!

N.B. Click images for full sized versions

1. Setup Magento Caching

This is the first step you can take to speed up your Magento after a fresh install, simply login to Magento as the admin user and go to the System menu and choose Cache Management. Select the following 4 options: (more…)

Jump start your business

An excellent way to jump start your business is to sign up for a twitter account. Signing up is an extremely user-friendly process…you just click the sign up link, put the requested information in the form provided, and start “tweeting” (tweeting refers to little messages user’s post about themselves, or their business). You need only take a quick glance at any marketing material written in the last couple of years, to realize social networking sites like Twitter, are a “must have” in your company’s promotion arsenal. Twitter marketing works similarly for both online and offline companies, giving you an opportunity to network in the same place as many of your current and future customers do.
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