Monthly Archives: 2024

2025 is almost here and it thrills us with new opportunities and hopes. Yet, we would also like to acknowledge this year's achievements we have been working on.

So, before the clock strikes midnight, let us take you through the key moments of Magefan's 2024 journey. 

Team

Starting with the most important part of Magefan - the team. This year we welcomed 2 new members to our Magefan family.

Also, one of our colleagues went to serve in Ukrainian Armed Forces to defend our country’s freedom and peace from russian invasion. The entire team and his workplace await his return back to the Magefan office.

Meet Magento Events

Magefan was happy to be among the sponsors of many great Meet Magento events in 2024. Here they are: Meet Magento India, Meet Magento Romania, Meet Magento UK and last but not least - Meet Magento Netherlands.

 Supporting the events within the Magento ecosystem is an honour to our company and a way to support the development of the platform itself.

New Extension Releases

When you decide to jump on the eCommerce bandwagon, one of the most important decisions to make is to choose what platform to manage your store on. Why? Since the platform you choose directly defines the management costs, the number of integrations you'll need, and the complexity of scaling up. The choice won't come easy with the number of options available. But Magento vs Shopify will pop up the most often. 

Shopify is a more beginner-friendly, hosted platform with a set pricing and easy drag-and-drop interface. At the same time, Magento provides more flexibility and customization options along with plenty of free integrations.

So, if you've been struggling to choose between Shopify or Magento, you're in the right place. We'll dive deeper into all vital eCommerce store features of both platforms to make the Magento vs Shopify choice easier for you.

Ready to start?

Shopify vs Magento: Comparison Chart

Before we dive deeper into the details, let's quickly overview all the features both

Every time you need to do some testing, roll out an update or fix a bug, you need to enable the Magento 2 maintenance mode. It initiates the display of the "Service Temporarily Unavailable" messages across all your website pages.

So, regardless of other Magento modes, the maintenance mode causes the most inconvenience for both merchants and users. Especially if they don't know what that mode is about.

That's why today you'll get all the answers about what is Magento maintenance mode, why it matters and how to use it properly. We'll also share some secrets about enabling maintenance mode in Magento without downtime.

Intrigued? Let's get started!

What is Magento 2 Maintenance Mode?

Magento 2 maintenance mode is a process of temporarily disabling users from accessing your website while you perform updates, customizations, or other improvements. If you enable maintenance mode, website visitors will see a maintenance page with a custom message.

Some exceptions exist when users from certain

Running a Shopify store doesn't come down to featuring products on your own website only. You also have to cover other markets to drive more attention to your brand and attract potential buyers.

There are plenty of ways of sharing your products on other channels. Yet, the go-to option of many remains the same — product feeds.

Creating product feeds manually is a thing of the past since the  Shopify apps fully take care of the process. You'll find a multitude of options out there, and choosing the right app can be quite a struggle.

So, we've saved you the trouble and prepared a list of the best product feed apps for Shopify. May you find the one that meets your needs best!

Top Shopify Product Feed Apps

Icon	App name	Developer	Price	Free plan	Free trial
	Shopping Feeds ‑ Magefan	Magefan	Standard - $19/month Pro - $39/month
	Simprosys Google Shopping Feed	Simprosys InfoMedia	Up to 500 Products - $4.99/month 501-1000 Products - $8.99/month 1001-5000 Products - $13.99/month 5001-10000 Products

Hi, Magefan customers. And welcome to the newbies of our blog.

The News & Updates digest of November 2024 is here!

We're happy to share our latest updates and developments to Magento 2 extensions and Shopify Apps.

Let's start!

Magento 2 Translation Extension

New features of Magento 2 Translation Extension!

Features:

• Added the "Flush Cache On Translation Change" option. When enabled the translation cache is automatically flushed (on adding/editing translations). When disabled the translation cache is marked as invalid correspodingly (Plus & Extra)
• Added the "Ignore GWS Permissions On Translation Grid" option. It allows you to ignore GWS permissions (Plus & Extra).

The latest available version is v 2.3.5

Request a FREE trial

Magento 2 Rich Snippets Extension

New features of Magento 2 Rich Snippets Extension!

Features:

• Now the Microdata value (HTML attributes and tags) is set as default for the Structured Data Type option for the FAQ widget.
• Now it is allowed to use PRE HTML tag

The opportunities e-commerce offers these days often go underrated. You can sell literally everywhere — Google, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest — you name it. But getting there is obviously not as easy as it sounds. 

One of the first things that opens the door to other channels is the Shopify product feed. So that's what we'll focus on today. You'll discover what it is and what benefits it brings to the table.

You'll also learn how to create product feeds in Shopify manually or using the Shopify apps. So you drive targeted customers and expose your products to a wider audience with no complex configurations.

Ready to start?

What is Shopify Product Feed?

Shopify product feed is a structured data file with detailed information about your inventory. It contains data about product names, descriptions, pricing, availability, URLs, images and other details.

Example of the product feed in Shopify

Seems overwhelming, right? 

It kind of is. But trust me, this file is going to bring lots of traffic

eCommerce is booming right now making it the best time to start an eCommerce store. Once the "when" and "how" are established, it's time to choose what platform to create your store on. That's exactly when things start to get complicated. There simply are too many of them.

Today we'll focus on, one of the best eCommerce platforms with unlimited opportunities — Magento. The Magento statistics we've collected in this post will help you get to know the platform better. 

You'll learn about the market share, usage, popularity, brands that use Magento and other fascinating facts.

Now let the numbers speak.

Magento Statistics and Facts: General

• Magento (Adobe Commerce) is one of the top ten most popular eСommerce platforms.
• In October 2024, 120,947 live websites on the Internet used the Magento platform, and an additional 366,747 domains that redirected to sites in this list.
• Businesses grow three times faster on Magento than on any other platform.
• In 2018, Adobe acquired the Magento platform

While merchants are desperately looking for ways to drive more traffic to their stores, they tend to ignore blogging. Why? Probably because blogging on eCommerce is more of a long-term investment.  

You won’t see results immediately as you start. It’s true. But if you want to introduce yourself to new customers and grow your community, there’s no better tool. 

Nonetheless, it’s just the tip of the iceberg of eCommerce blog benefits. We’ll cover more of them today. You’ll see that starting a blog is quick, easy, and profitable for your store, regardless of the products you sell.

Those of you who manage Magento vs Shopify stores will also find ready-made blogging solutions.

What Is a Business Blog?

A business blog is a blog on a company website where you can publish articles about your products, news, and other information to drive more traffic and sales correspondingly.

You can see that as a way to communicate with your customers. But from a business standpoint, it’s a part of your content

Videos have a special place in the content strategy of many Magento stores. Promoting and exploring a product via an animated clip is easier than through a lengthy text.

That said, you certainly want your videos to appear in the targeted search results and reach the right audience. That's why, you have to get your hands on one of the most important rich snippets in Magento — video rich snippets. 

Don't know how to add them? No worries, today you'll learn all the key details about Magento video rich snippets, their types and ways of adding them.

So, let's get right to it!

What is Video Structured Data?

Video structured data is a snippet of code which defines the structure and key elements of the video. Its main properties are name, content URL, upload date and thumbnail image URL. However, there are other supported properties you may use.

Video rich snippets allow you to define what info should be displayed in the search results. Thumbnail images, video descriptions, duration and other

Hi, Magefan customers and welcome to the newbies of our blog.

The News & Updates digest of October 2024 is here!

We're happy to share with you our latest updates and developments to Magento 2 extensions and Shopify Apps.

Let's start!

Magento 2 Translation Extension

New features of Magento 2 Translation Extension!

Features:

• Security improvements. Now Magento SecureRenderer is used to whitelist an inline script.
• Minor code improvements.

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue with the URL key translation.
• Fixed JavaScript error in the admin panel on product and category edit pages when HTML minification is enabled. The error was in the extension version 2.3.2 only.

The latest available version is v 2.3.3

Request a FREE trial

Magento 2 Google Indexing API

New features of Magento 2 Google Indexing API Extension!

Features:

• Extension performance optimization.

Fixes:

• Fixed an error: Call to a member function getType() on null in Model/Requester.php:145.

The latest available version is v 2.2.1

Request FREE

In the world of eCommerce, many new initiatives come on stage and then rapidly disappear. The fashion industry though seems to be more or less untouched. However, it comes with both pros and cons.

On one hand, it secures all the materials and assets for the newcomers' soft launch. At the same time, the constantly growing number of new stores keeps you on your toes.

You need to find effective ways to stand out and be demanded. That's what Shopify offers. There are versatile Shopify apps to help you on the way. Yet, how do you choose not only the best but the most relevant one?

We'll make this a little easier for you with our list of 15+ best Shopify apps for clothing stores. Hopefully you'll find just the right option for you.

Top Shopify Apps for Clothing Stores

Icon	App name	Developer	Price	Free plan	Free trial
	Size Chart - Magefan	Magefan	Standard - $4.99/month Pro - $9.99/month
	EM Lookbook ‑ Shop by Gallery	Expert Village Media Technologies	Basic - $4.99/month Pro - $12.99/month Business

You don't have to imagine how frustrating 503 maintenance pages and other error messages are. Everyone hates them — merchants lose potential customers while the latter get interrupted when shopping. It's a lose-lose situation. 

Every developer knows that errors on the page are a part of the Magento deployment, including the Magento static content deployment process. But very few actually know how to avoid it with the zero downtime deployment. 

So today we'll break down every detail of how the zero downtime deployment works and why you need it. You'll also learn whether can you actually achieve zero downtime without buying Magento Commerce. 

But let's start with the basics first.

How Does Magento Deployment Work?

Deployment is a method of building modules, patches and other code and delivering it to end users through different environments. In other words, it's pushing new code from one environment to the other.

These environment usually include:

• Local — where developers build the code.

Collecting customer data in your store is a must if you want to deliver a personalised user experience. While you can track some data with default Magento cookies these are hardly enough to reach the goal.

That's when you resort to some services that help you collect more data and install extensions to deliver the message to visitors. But there is no need for so many resources if you can get all of these in one place — your admin panel — using the Magento 2 Cookie Consent Extension. 

So, today you'll learn how to configure, create and track cookie consents in Magento. On top of that, you'll enable compatibility with Google Consent Mode with only one button. 

Ready to start?

Create Magento Cookie Groups

Before you create any cookies in Magento, you should define the cookie groups you'll add them to. For that navigate to Marketing > Cookie Consent > Groups and hit the Add New Group button.

1. Specify the group Name and Description that will be displayed on the frontend.
2. Make the cookie group

The Basic plan of the Magento 2 Google Page Speed Optimizer allows you to cover the basics — lazy load, JS and CSS modification and merging. However, if you want to cover your website speed to a much greater extend, you need to upgrade the plan to Plus or Extra.

So, today you'll learn how to upgrade your Google Page Speed Optimizer plan. 

Upgrade using composer

First of all, you need to remove the extension you currently use:

composer remove magefan/module-speed-optimization*

Then, proceed with installing an upgraded version. For that, go to My Account > My Downloads and press the Install via Composer button to get the installation instructions.

Upgrade using archive

If the Google Page Speed Optimizer was installed via archive, you need to upgrade it the same way. Just download the extension archive from your Magefan account and extract it.

We recommend backing up the extension folder on your

The faster your website loads, the better — users love it and Google loves it. If you've been improving your website speed with Google PageSpeed Insights for a while and have seen no miracles so far, there's only one reason. You might have misinterpreted the report.

Google PageSpeed Insights checker provides reports based on real and "artificial" data. So, it's important to know what metrics to focus on to improve not only the technical side but user experience. 

In this guide, you'll find everything you need to excel in GooglePageSpeed Insights and finally take your website to the "green zone". 

What is Google PageSpeed Insights?

Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) is a free tool that analyses your website performance in terms of loading time, responsiveness and user experience on mobile and desktop devices. It uses a 0-100 store scale to give feedback on how your web application is doing:

If you decide to remove Magento 2 Cookie Consent, please follow the steps below. You can contact our team for a free consultation in case you have any issues with Magefan's extension.

Remove Extension Files

Removing file instructions depends on the way Cookie Consent has been installed.

1. If you can find the extension files in the folder

app/code/Magefan/CookieConsent

then remove this folder.

2. If the extension was installed via the composer and its files located in the folder

vendor/magefan/module-cookie-consent

then run composer CLI command to remove it

composer remove magefan/module-cookie-consent

Once extension files have been removed, run these Magento CLI commands:

php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Remove Extension Data (optional)

Attention! This will clean all Cookie Consent

If you need to update Magento 2 Cookie Consent by Magefan, please follow the steps below.

Update using composer

If the Cookie Consent was installed via the composer (check if vendor/magefan/module-cookie-consent folder exists), then you need to run these simple CLI commands in Magento 2 directory:

composer remove magefan/module-cookie-consent
composer require magefan/module-cookie-consent
php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

Update using archive and FTP

If the Cookie Consent module was installed via FTP (check if app/code/Magefan/CookieConsent folder exists), then follow these commands:

1. Download the latest version of the module archive from magefan.com.

2. Extract archive.

3. Make the backup copy of the app/code/Magefan/CookieConsent and then remove it.

4. Using FTP, copy the app and lib folders from the archive to your

You can install Magento 2 Cookie Consent by Magefan, using composer or archive installation methods.

Installation via composer (recommended)

Please navigate to your Magefan Account > Downloads > Install via Composer to get the composer installation instructions.

Installation using archive and FTP

1. Download Cookie Consent ZIP-Archive from magefan.com website (not GitHub or other sources).
2. Extract files.
3. Copy app and lib folder from the archive to your Magento 2 folder.
   
   
4. In a command line, using "cd", navigate to your Magento 2 root directory.
5. Run CLI commands:

php bin/magento setup:upgrade
php bin/magento setup:di:compile
php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

When creating content for your store, you certainly want to make it user-friendly and easy to browse through. The visual appeal is as critical as the content. Thus, to liven things up you may need to add a block of products here or there or display some other dynamic info.

Usually, you would need to dive into code to achieve this. But not in Magento 2 which offers you widgets instead.

Today, you'll explore Magento widgets in more detail and learn key features that will help you use them to the fullest.

What are Magento Widgets?

Magento widgets are pieces of code which allow you to place content in a specific place in your store. Widgets can feature various types of content from dynamic product blocks and CMS blocks to images, videos, text and other elements. In Magento, you can add widgets via the admin panel by setting specific display options.

Widgets are incredibly flexible, highly functional and easy to manage. You can place them at any block reference in your store and use them for

Hi, Magefan customers and welcome to the newbies of our blog.

September 2024 News & Updates digest is here!

The first month of the autumn 2024 has brought us amazing updates to our Magento 2 extensions and Shopify Apps that most of our customers have been waiting for.

Happy reading!

Magento 2 Blog Extension

New features of Magento 2 Blog Extension!

Features:

• Added option to create a blog post and featured image using AI (ChatGPT) (Blog Extra).
• Improved blog import from Google Blogger via CSV import (Blog Extra).
• Improved redirects on URL key change (Blog Plus and Extra).
• Added image to blog category and tag (Blog Plus and Extra).
• Added category and tag images to the category grid and tags in the admin panel.
• Added post Image to the post grid in the admin panel.
• Product Widget extension has been updated to version 2.0.14.
• Added information about the co-author to all templates for the post list.
• Added LinkedIn share button.
• Added an option to define what social network is available in

The process of creating blog posts consists of multiple stages: researching topics, looking for the right keywords, drafting a structure and creating content. Although our Magento 2 Blog offers you the best blog management options, you still have to create content yourself. 

At least it used to be like that before we introduced the AI Writer that does all the heavy lifting for you. 

So, in this guide, you'll learn how to integrate it and create blog posts in Magento using AI in a few seconds.

Ready to start?

Configure AI Integration

Before you start creating blog posts using AI, you need to create the integration between the AI and Magento. In our Blog we use the Chat-GPT, so that's what we're going to work with.

Building the integration includes only two steps: retrieving the API keys and configuring the basic AI options. 

1. Retrieve API keys

First, create or sign in to your Open AI account and go to the platform.openai.com