You can include some dynamic content, e.g. all products from one category. Just add the following block to your CMS page to show all products from the category with ID 8 on a static landing page:

{{block type="catalog/product_list" 
    name="product_listing"
    template="catalog/product/list.phtml"
    category_id="8" }}

Now wouldn't it be great if you could also filter the products on attribute value? For instance to show all black cell phones on a static page? Well, now you can! With this new Magento landing page module you will be able to do this in a very easy way. Just download the module and copy it to the root of your Magento install. After this you will be able to show all black cell phones (this example is using the Magento sample data) by simply adding this block to your CMS page:

{{block type="Yoast_Filter/Result"
    name="filter_result"
    template="catalog/product/list.phtml"
    attribute_name="color"
    value="24"
    category="8" }}

Go to your newly created CMS page and you will see a page with all black cell phones. Now it is time to optimize your landing page with some good unique content, a nice title, search engine friendly url, some header tags and you will have a very seo friendly Magento landing page. In the same way you can filter all products on attribute value and/or category. So for a optimized landing page for all Apple Computers just create something like this example:

Example of the Magento Landing Pages module, click for larger version.

Dynamic attribute filter pages

Well designed pages created by hand with unique content will outperform dynamic generated ones, but it is a hell of a job to create 10k landing pages. So another great feature would be the option to create dynamic pages for each value of an attribute. After the installation of the module and the Magento demo data installed you can go to yourmagentoshop.com/f/color/24/ and you will get all black products on one page.

As you can see the url start with /f for calling the module name, /color is the attribute name and /24 is the value of the attribute. For drop-down and multi-select attributes this is a number (the ID of the attribute value), for text attributes it's the textvalue. An example URL of a text attribute for the Magento demo data would be yourmagentoshop.com/f/country_orgin/italy/.

Extending your Landing Page with static content

A page without content isn't very SEO friendly. The Magento CMS uses static blocks for text blocks. When you create a block with the identifier landing-$attribute-$value this block will be added to the above the product listing. So for the example above you should create a static block with the identifier landing-color-24 and voila, the static block is added to the page yourmagentoshop.com/f/color/24/.

Example Magento Landing Page

So by now you'll want to see an example. Well we've got one for you, though it's Dutch. We work with a Dutch childrens book site called Top Kinderboek of which all proceeds go to charities, and have used this feature to create author pages there. So check out this example: all books by Paul Biegel.

Layered Navigation for landing pages

Update 11-1-2010 Now it is even possible to add layered navigation to the landing pages. By default this is enabled for the dynamic pages, you can change this by editing the filter.xml. For the CMS pages you should add something like the following code to the XML update (note the setAttributeName and setValue):

<reference name="content">
<block type="Yoast_Filter/Result" name="filter_result" template="catalog/product/list.phtml">
<action method="setAttributeName"><attribute_name>color</attribute_name></action>
<action method="setValue"><value>24</value></action>
</block>
<block type="catalog/product_list_toolbar" name="product_list_toolbar" template="catalog/product/list/toolbar.phtml">
<block type="page/html_pager" name="product_list_toolbar_pager" template="page/html/pager.phtml" />
</block>
 <action method="setToolbarBlockName"><name>product_list_toolbar</name></action>
</reference>
<reference name="left">
<block type="Yoast_Filter/Layer_View" name="catalog.leftnav" before="-" template="catalog/layer/view.phtml"/>
</reference>

Downloads

So you were probably wondering by now, but You can download the module right here or install it through MagentoConnect.

Need help?

Of course, if you want to use this Landing Page module in your Magento install and would like us to help set it up, use the hire me form and let us know!

Landing pages module for Magento is a post by Joachim Houtman on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

How to get the most out your Magento install?

Magento is notorious for it speed and performance. But isn't necessary to have a killer web server to get very reasonable performance, it is all about the configuration of your server and the code of your template. However, after the 1.3 release there are some performance improvements, like Frontend Flat Catalog, and people measure reduction of loading times up to 40%. Another recent development is the Magento Compiler this module compiles all Magento files. From tests this module gave between 25% to 50% better performance. This module is still in beta and should not be used in a production environment for now.

The question is, what else can you do to speed up your Magento install?

Optimize your template for speed

More information can be found at the Magento SEO article.

Enable compression of your files

Mod_deflate allows output from your server to be compressed. To enable it for Magento edit your .htaccess, around line 74, in Magento root directory.

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>
############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</ifmodule>

Apache Module mod_expires

mod_expires controls the setting of the Expires HTTP header and the max-age directive of the Cache-Control HTTP header in server responses. To enable Expires HTTP header for Magento you had to change the code underat your .htaccess to.

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month"
</ifmodule>

Use PHP Accelerator

Install a PHP opcode cacher such as APC or XCache. This seems to deliver rather large improvement in the responsive of the Magento install. Some people note a reduce of loading time up to 70%.

Tune your MySQL configuration

You can modify the configuration of the MySQL server to take advantage of the server's RAM. The efficiency of this step are different, it seems to depends mainly on the number of products. When you have only 100 products, difference will be hardly to notice (below 100ms). But for shops with over 50.000 products there is a huge reduction of the loading time. To give an idea about the settings, for shops with only a limit number of products a query_cache_limit of 1MB will be enough. For larger stores the optimal query cache value can be 64MB. To get the optimal value you really need some testing. A good start point for your Query Cache configuration can be found here.

Speed up your Cache files

Magento makes extensive use of file-based storage for caching and session storage. The slowest component in a server is the hard drive, so if you use a memory-based file system such as tmpfs, you can save all those extra disk IO cycles by storing these temporary files in memory instead of storing them on your slow hard drive.

Let´s do this with tmpfs

Let's say your Magento install is at /var/www/domain.com/ so your cache and session directories are /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/ and /var/www/domain.com/var/session/ For cache we will allocate a max of 256MB RAM and for sessions 64MB RAM. It is important to give access to everyone (e.g your webserver Apache)

mount -t tmpfs -o size=256M,mode=0744 tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/
mount -t tmpfs -o size=64M,mode=0744 tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/session/

Now it might be a good idea to restore these volumes each time your server boots. Just add the following lines to your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/cache/ tmpfs size=256,mode=0744 0 0
tmpfs /var/www/domain.com/var/session/ tmpfs size=64,mode=0744 0 0

Please note, your tmpfs is temporary in the sense that nothing will be created on your hard drive. If you reboot, everything in tmpfs will be lost.

Save the sessions in your database

Another option for the sessions is to save them in your database. Magento supports this very well and it is one small step to make this work. Just edit app/etc/local.xmland set

<session_save><![CDATA[files]]></session_save>

to

<session_save><![CDATA[db]]></session_save>

it will then save all sessions in the database which is a much quicker access than the filesystem. When you use a cluster enviroment you had to use this option.

Enable Apache KeepAlives

Enable Apache KeepAlives, this allows persistent connections. These long-lived HTTP sessions allow multiple requests to be send over the same TCP connection, this can result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with lots of images. An example setting can be:

KeepAlive On
KeepAliveTimeout 2

Need more Magento Performance?

Ok, you are a very successful online retailer and it is time to cluster, no problem. This means that one single-server doesn't have enough power to keep your customers happy and so you need a clustered environment with two or more servers. A first step can be to start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

The most easy to start is using an separate media server, e.g. media.domain.com. Magento has native support for this. You can configure 'Base Media URL' secure and unsecure under web configurations. This allow you to serve media form one server without the needs to synchronize any directory. Another option is to start using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for delivering the static files like images. MaxCDN has some options for Magento that are quite nice.

Another option is to use more than one database servers this tactic is called "database replication". One database will be the "master" and all others will be called "slaves". The master is the only database that accepts any sort of write-base queries. These write queries are then replicated to any of the slave servers in real-time. A post at the Magento blog will get you on the right track.

To summarize, 5 quick wins

• move the the rules in the .htaccess files from the directories to virtualhost configuration directives
• install Xcache or APC PHP cache accelerator
• clean up your template and layout
• make sure Apache KeepAlives is enabled
• use a memory-based file system for Magento's var/cache/ and var/session/ directory

Conclusion

This article give a introduction how to improve your Magento site performance, none of these tips are revolutionary. Because every website's scenario is different, when you really want to get the most out of your Magento install you need to hire a professional. The only way to discover the optimal server configuration is testing, a really great tool to use is Browsermob, load testing with real web browsers so you will able to put even the Magento checkout process under load testing.

Now, all of the above you can’t do on your average host, you need a VPS that provides you full control of your server environment. Check out WestHost’s sister company, VPS.net, for a VPS environment that would give you full control.

Magento performance hosting is a post by Joachim Houtman on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!