Consultancy Pointing you in the right direction
Experience counts
Even for a well established business – asking for advice is not a sign of weakness; if anything, it is just a shortcut to success.
We have been planning, designing, developing and hosting Magento stores since 2008. So over the last 4 years we would like to think that we’ve learnt a little along the way – and others would agree. We have been called upon repeatedly by small, medium and enterprise businesses to offer Magento consultative services.
If you are planning anything new with your store, why wouldn’t you want to take advantage of our knowledge?
Let Elevate help your business
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Review your hosting platform
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Improve performance
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Implement new functionality
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Anything else Magento …
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Anything else Magento
We have just given a few examples of the types of consultancy that we frequently carry out, but it certainly isn’t exhaustive. So whether you are looking for help planning a new store, migrating from another e-commerce platform, preparing for a large scale marketing campaign, expanding your current store or anything else Magento related, speak to us.
When you think you may need a little guidance or could benefit from our advice, get in touch.
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Review your hosting platform
Office bench testing a new clusterThe company providing the fastest UK Magento hosting – that’s us.
The company who provides Magento hosting to other Magento agencies – that’s us.
The company frequently consulted by rival hosting companies to achieve better Magento performance – you guessed it, that’s us.We continually test new hardware and benchmark different software configurations to see what yields the best result; which allows us to select the right hardware and software configuration for your requirements. Not the most expensive, not the most heavily marketed, just the best performing platform for running your Magento store.
It is this knowledge that has led to other hosting companies asking for our advice, or referring their customers to us to correctly configure and optimise servers for them; most recently UKFast and Rackspace.
You are probably aware that just having a good specification server does not equal a fast site. Typically, our optimisation yields a performance increase of around 4x, respectively cutting your infrastructure costs by a factor of four.
For single-server deployments, we can quickly and easily advise what hardware to choose; then atop of this, we offer a complete set-up and Magento optimisation service – where we install your standard web applications (Apache/PHP/MySQL), then tune them to achieve the best performance for your store. This can be completed within 1 day.
For complex, multiple-server deployments, we work with you to produce a high performance, highly available, load balanced cluster that satisfies current demand, future growth and budget. We then supply a report highlighting what hardware and configuration we would recommend, with performance statistics and benchmark results to reinforce this selection. Then, once approved, we configure and sufficiently load test the cluster before finally migrating your live store to it.
Speed up your store and lower your infrastructure costs – contact our team today to discuss your options.
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Improve performance
Speed is everything, no-one likes a slow site, not you, not your customers and not even search engines. We offer performance audits that highlight issues and areas of concern with your template. The first thing we do is take a sample of page load times for typical pages (homepage, category view, product view and product search).
Your budget and targets will dictate the depths as to how far we investigate; from the high level changes such as CSS spiriting to low level changes such as template PHP code review.
At the end of our audit we produce a brief report and if you opt for the service, we address all issues outlined and provide before and after performance results. We can spend as little as 1 day, to 10 days to resolve issues.
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Implement new functionality
Adding new features to your site can be achieved by one of two ways; using an off-the-shelf 3rd party extension, or building a custom extension.
For example, if you were looking for a multiple rate, multiple method shipping extension; we wouldn’t consider the bespoke route. Instead we would recommend an extension that we have tried, tested and trust – Webshopapps Matrix Rates. If you were looking for a rapid catalogue import tool, to auto-create attributes, categories, attribute sets that also supported scheduling, dry-run and FTP push/pull; we would tell you to use Unirgy uRapidFlow.
But what if you wanted to integrate the Magento backend with a courier? So that on shipping an order you could automatically create consignments, choose the most cost-effective shipping method and have it print off a label on your warehouse’s thermal printer. When asked this, we knew a bespoke extension was the only option. So we built a custom, but re-deployable, extension that seamlessly connected Parcel Force to Magento many custom solutions we have built.
We have both the experience and honesty to advise you when it is appropriate to use a competitor’s product; or levy our extensive Magento developmentmpetency to build you a complex, bespoke module to suit your needs.
Anything else Magento
We have just given a few examples of the types of consultancy that we frequently carry out, but it certainly isn’t exhaustive. So whether you are looking for help planning a new store, migrating from another e-commerce platform, preparing for a large scale marketing campaign, expanding your current store or anything else Magento related, speak to us.
When you think you may need a little guidance or could benefit from our advice, get in touch.