This tutorial will cover the following major areas:
Main configuration settings of your Magento E-Commerce website.
Magento editing
Enable SEO-friendly URLs in Magento
How to enable SSL in Magento
How to Change Magento Store Language
Further reading:
How to login to Magento admin backend
Magento Website Optimization Tips
Magento Website Security Tutorial
Main configuration settings of your Magento
In this section, we will cover the main configuration settings of your Magento E-Commerce website. To access the configuration area of your Magento, please login your Magento Admin Dashboard and navigate to System ? Configuration tab.
To configure your Magento Store, you will need to visit these menus:
Menu 1: General Settings
Menu 2: Design Settings
Menu 3: Currency Setup
Menu 4: Store Email Address
Menu 5: Catalog Settings
General Settings
Under the General Tab you can configure several country specific options of your Magento Store. First, please select your default store country and the allowed country. Depending on the countries in which your business can operate you should select or deselect any desired countries.
Next, you should select the countries for which the exact State will be required if at all required. Then, proceed with your Store Locale Options. These settings affects your store time zone and working days. The last step is to configure your Store Information including your Store Name, address and telephone number.
When you are ready with your settings you may click on the save button at the top right corner of your screen.
Further reading:
How to login to Magento admin backend
Magento Website Optimization Tips
Magento Website Security Tutorial
Design Settings
In the HTML Head section you may configure your Magento store favico and Default Title, title prefix, suffix and the default description. The Default Title will be used for any page that does not have a specific Title configured and the prefix/suffix options can be used if you would like to apply a certain word phrase before or after your page titles.
Under the Header section on the same page below you can configure your Magento Store Logo and default welcome message as well as the footer copyright text in the Footer section.
Currency Setup
Another important aspect of your Magento store configuration is your currency setup. You may refer to the Currency Setup tab via the tab on the left. Here you can configure your default Magento store currency and allow additional currencies that will be available to your clients to pay for their orders.
Store Email Address
Next, you should configure your points of contact. This can be done via the Store Email Addresses tab on the left.
Catalog Settings
After you have your store basic settings applied you should consider change your Magento Frontend Catalog settings. This can be done via the Catalog tab on the left.
In this section you can configure how your products are displayed (grid or list), how many products per page will be displayed and many other settings.
Further reading:
How to login to Magento admin backend
Magento Website Optimization Tips
Magento Website Security Tutorial
How to Edit Magento "Contact Us" Page
By default Magento comes with an easy to use "Contact Us" page via which your website visitors can easily contact you or leave feedback and suggestions. The link to the Contact Us page is by default located in your footer links on a brand new installation but you place a link to that page anywhere you need it.
Still, before being able to actually receive emails from your visitors you should make sure that your Contact Us form is properly configured. To do this, please log in your Magento admin panel and refer to System ? Configuration from the top navigation menu.
On the next page click on Contacts from the menu on the left. This will refer you to the configuration settings of your Contact Us page.
Make sure you expand both the Contact Us and Email Options sections. First, you should make sure that your Contact Us page is enabled by choosing Yes from the first drop down menu.
Next, you have 3 options to configure:
Send Emails To - This is the email address to which all messages submitted in your contact us form will be sent.
Email Sender - This contact is used for the email "From" field. You should not be worried, the original sender email address will be actually included in the email so you will be able to see you actually submitted the email to you. You can create or configure different store email addresses via your site admin ? System ? Configuration ? Store Email Addresses. It is a good idea to set a real store email address to prevent your contact us page messages going to your spam folder.
Email Template - This option allows you to change the template of the email. You can add new templates via System ? Transactional E-mails ? Add New Template.
When you have all options configured, click the Save button at the top right corner of your screen.
Further reading:
How to login to Magento admin backend
Magento Website Optimization Tips
Magento Website Security Tutorial
How to enable SEO-friendly URLs in Magento
Optimizing your website for the search engines such as Google and Yahoo! is a very important aspect of your successful online business. Enabling the Search Engine Friendly URLs for your Magento store is relatively easy and can greatly improve your search engine ranking as well as make your Magento website more pleasant and intuitive.
Todhost Magento Hosting package is specially optimized to provide fast and secure hosting environment to support all Magento features and functionality including SEF URLs and mod_rewrite. Enabling the Magento SEF URLs will not only make your URLs more human-readable by including the actual product or category name in the address but will also remove the annoying index.php from your URL. For example:
http://example.com/index.php/contacts/
will be converted to the more friendly one:
http://example.com/contacts/
To activate the Magento SEF URLs you should login your Magento Admin panel and refer to the System ? Configuration menu from the top navigation.
From the menu on the left, click on the WEB section and refer to Search Engine Optimization.
From there, simply set the Use Web Server Rewrites to YES from the drop down menu.
Please note that Magento uses Apache server rewrites for this function which requires a .htaccess. This file contains several rewrite rules which actually form the SEF URLs. In case your Magento store is installed in the root of your domain (ex: http://domain.com) you most probably will not need to perform any changes in this file.
Still, if your Magento store is located under a subdirectory (ex: http://yourdomain.om/magento/) you will need to edit the .htaccess file via FTP or your control panel file manager and change the following line:
#RewriteBase /magento/
to
RewriteBase /your-magento-folder-here/
Basically, you need to remove the "#" sign and change "magento" to your actual folder name.
Further reading:
How to login to Magento admin backend
Magento Website Optimization Tips
Magento Website Security Tutorial
How to enable SSL in Magento
SSL certificates provide additional security for your visitors during sign up, check out or any other process during which different personal information is provided. For example, if your Magento Store can process credit card information you should consider protecting your clients' personal information and credit card details by setting up a SSL certificate for your website that will encrypt any sensitive data and protect it from any malware activity.
Furthermore, SSL certificate will greatly improve your business and website credibility as your visitors will see that their data is protected and you are accredited and verified business owner by a well-known SSL vendor.
Todhost Magento Hosting SpeedUp plan is specfically optimized to provide fast and secure hosting environment to support all Magento features and provides Free SSL Certificate.
As soon as you have your SSL purchased and installed you can activate it for your Magento store via your Magento Admin panel ? System ? Configuration section.
On the left side you should click on the Web and refer to the Secured menu.
In this section you should edit the following values:
Base URL - Change the url from http://example.com/ to https://example.com/ where example.com is your actual domain name.
Use Secure URLs in Frontend - By default Magento will protect all pages on which your clients input any sensitive information such as check out and register/login pages. Still, if you would like to have your Magento store to work via HTTPS only, you may set this value to YES. Still, be advised that enabling your SSL for your Magento Store frontend might have negative performance effect on your website as data encryption requires additional time and resources from your website.
Use Secure URLs in Admin - If you would like to have your Magento Admin panel accessible only via HTTPS you should consider setting this value to YES.
How to Change Magento Store Language
You can change the default Magento language relatively easy. First, you need to obtain the desired language translation. This can be done via the official Magento Translations page.
Todhost's Magento Hosting packages are specially optimized to provide fast and secure hosting environment for Magento with free 24/7 Magento Technical Support.
To download the desired package, click on the Select link which will bring you to the next page via which you need to download the package itself. This will download the desired language pack translation on your local computer. Extract the zip file and open your favorite FTP client. The folder of the extracted translation should be uploaded under the root of your Magento directory located under your hosting account. If you are not sure how to upload these files, please check our FTP Tutorial.
Now when you have the translation files, please refer to your Magento Admin Dashboard and select the System ? Configuration menu.
Under the General menu scroll to the Locale Options section and select the desired language from the drop down menu.
When the new locale is selected, please save your new settings. In case new translation is still not active on your store home page, please follow our tutorial on How to clear your Magento store cache.
