Managing the daily challenges of an online shop is stressful enough without the added technical issues of Magento. For those that are new to this software, you’ll want to take a look at these 6 common errors and their fixes. It should save plenty of time in the future and you’ll avoid the need for costly support.
Slow performance
A slow performing site could be causing havoc with conversions, turning customers away before they’ve even browsed your range of products. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to improve Magento’s performance by enabling the Compilation function. To do this, go to the ‘admin panel’ and click on ‘System’ followed by ‘Tools’ and ‘Compilation’. By enabling this feature, page loads should be optimised by as much as 50%.
‘Access denied’
There’s nothing more frustrating than the ‘access denied’ error screen. If this annoyance crops up, you should first log out of the Magento admin area and log back in. If it still persists, you may have to reset the admin privileges. Go to the Magento admin area and click on ‘System’ followed by ‘Permissions’ and ‘Roles’ then ‘Administrators’. From here, click on the ‘Role Resources’ option and ensure that ‘Resource Access’ is turned on ‘All.’ After saving, the access denied error should no longer continue.
Unfriendly Search Engine URL’s
Friendly search engine URL’s are essential for optimum SEO. To enable this, you must first log in to the Magento admin area and click ‘Configuration’. On the sub navigation panel which sits on the left under the system navigation, click to ‘switch to Web page’. After the page loads, hit the ‘Search Engines Optimization’ tab and mark as ‘yes’ for the ‘Use Web Server Rewrites’. Finally, click to save and Magento search engine friendly URL’s will be enabled.
Magento logging out too soon
The default settings of Magento specify an annoyingly short cookie lifetime which can see the program logging you out too soon. To change this, go to the backend admin area, click on ‘Configuration’ followed by ‘Session Cookie Management’ and then ‘Cookie’ lifetime. From here, you’ll have the option to extend the lifetime meaning you won’t be logged out as frequently.
Changes don’t show in the Frontend
All changes to XML or PHTML files should show instantaneously in the Frontend. In the event that these don’t seem to be updating, and your Frontend fails to show the changes made, you’ll need to refresh your cache. This can be done by navigating to ‘System’ settings and ‘Cache Management’. From here, choose ‘Refresh Caches’ and the issue should be resolved.
Unruly extensions
There’s a very quick way to turn off an extension which is especially handy for those which are showing critical errors. Start by going to ‘appetcmodules’ to bring up the XML files. Here you can switch an extension off by renaming the XML file. For example, ‘testextension.xml’ could be renamed to ‘testextension.xml.off’. Finally, clear your cache and the extension should no longer be active.