How To Solve the "Redundant Hostname" Warning in Google Analytics

Last month (November 14th), Google introduced a change to their Analytics platform where users are now warned if "redundant hostnames" are linking to their website content. We have since been contacted by a number of clients that are concerned about this, and we therefore though it would be helpful to show you how you can easily solve this problem.

If you are an Analytics user you may see the following warning after logging in to your account:

"You have 1 unresolved issue: Redundant Hostnames"

What Google is trying to tell you is that more than one domain can be used to access a particular page. If multiple domains leads to the same page, Google and other search engines sees it as duplicate content and may hurt your rankings. By default, most web servers are configured to respond to both www.yourdomain.com and yourdomain.com, causing this issue if not additional steps are taken. This issue could also occur if your site is accessible by its IP address.

The solution is to ensure that all traffic goes to your site via your main domain. A simple way to do this is by adding a 301 redirect rule to your .htaccess file. Besides getting rid of the warning in your Analytics dashboard, it is good for SEO (search engine optimization) and recommended best-practice to ensure that all links to your site appears consistent across search engines. It is not important whether you choose the www or non-www version as your main domain as long as it is consistent.

To fix the problem, simply add the following to a .htaccess file at the root of your site:

 RewriteEngine On # This line may already exist # Rewrite all requests to the 'www' version
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC]
 RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mydomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

If your site is also accessible by its IP address (usually only if you have a dedicated IP), use the following instead:

 RewriteEngine On # This line may already exist # Rewrite all requests to the 'www' version
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain\.com$ [NC,OR]
 RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^123\.123\.123\.123$ [NC] RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.mydomain.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L]

Remember to replace with your actual details (domain/IP) in the above rules. This small fix should keep Google happy and give you maximum in return for your SEO efforts! As an additional tip, if you are also using Google Webmaster Tools you should make sure to set your "Preferred Hostname" under Site Settings to ensure that your domain is consistent across all traffic from Google.

Hosting Multiple Magento Stores in One Account

One of the unique features of Magento is its ability to manage multiple websites and stores within one installation, making it super easy to create customized store views targeting a particular region, customer segment or market. At ProperHost, we have years of experience in setting up multi-store hosting environments for Magento allowing you to focus all your effort on growing your business.

Magento multi-store hosting

Our multi-store ready hosting plans includes everything you need to get started:

Host multiple domain names in one account
Enable SSL for multiple domains allows each store to have a unique, secure checkout experience
Manage all stores from the same administrative dashboard for more efficient order processing
Industry-leading hosting environment providing unprecedented performance for Magento
Daily automated backups
Redundant, enterprise-class SSD RAID-10 storage system
Secure CloudLinux CageFS file system providing full isolation and protection
Advanced features such as Memcached in-memory caching system, Percona high-performance database server and LiteSpeed Enterprise.
...and much more!

For detailed instructions on how to configure your Magento multi-store environment check out our knowledgebase article.

For more information about our multi-store hosting plans, see:
http://www.properhost.com/magento-hosting/multiple-stores

If you have any questions, contact our sales team today for assistance.

Recommended Extensions for Improving Magento Performance

From time to time we get the question from our customers - what can be done to further speed up the performance of Magento? Our servers are already heavily optimized and Magento runs fast with no additional tweaks, but we want to highlight a few recommended 3rd party extensions. Our partner Extendware is a Magento silver partner and offers many Magento extension that will help improve your store.

Magento Full Page Cache

Full Page Cache reduces your sites First Byte Time and increases speed which is great for customer experience and search engine optimization! As a ProperHost customer you get 1 year free use of this extension. Register to download your free copy.

Minify Javascript / CSS

Speed up your site, improve your search engine site rankings and conversion rate, and improve your user experience in the process. Minify Js / CSS extension reduces page size, bandwidth, request count, and server load without anything more than installing this easy to use and feature-full extension.

Magento Image Optimization

Images are very important for online stores, but unnecessarily large images can slow down the user experience and reduce search engine rankings. Image Optimization will optimize your images and reduce their size without sacrificing image quality, so that your site images are faster loading.

Magento Cache Warmer

The Cache Warmer will ensure your full page cache solution is always warmed and ready to serve your customers pages at the fastest speed possible. Efficiently written to reduce bandwidth, CPU, and crawl time.

Magento Performance Cache Backends

This extension adds additional cache backends to the Full Page Cache, including an optimized file based cache and a Memcached based cache.

Magento Improved Indexing

Increase the speed of your administrative backend. Do you have a slow admin backend when saving products, categories, etc? Deferred Indexing will speed up your admin backend by making the saving of products, categories, etc more responsive.

Magento Lucene Search

Improve your store search relevancy and increase search performance. Stores that have relevant and fast search results encourage sells by ensuring customers find the products they want.

Magento Sphinx Search

Increase revenue and customer satisfaction with faster, more relevant search results. Lucene Search is a powerful and flexible search solution that helps ensure your customers can always find the products they want.

Also check out the other great magento extensions that can help you make the most out of your store.

Magento CE 1.9 and Enterprise Edition 1.14 Released

Magento CE 1.9 and EE 1.14

Yesterday, Magento Community Edition (CE) 1.9 and Enterprise Edition (EE) 1.14 was released. Among the new features are a brand new responsive theme that makes it possible to quickly get a tablet and smart phone-friendly site, a new payment option and streamlined checkout to help increase sales, and cross-border price consistency. Merchants also benefit by being better able to support customers across geographies, and from improvements in product quality, search and security.

Some key benefits from the release notes:

Merchants can get a tablet and smart phone friendly responsive site in about half the time as before, speeding time to market and freeing up resources for other projects.
With a responsive site, merchants will be better able to participate in the fast growing mobile commerce space, and will have a site that is more easily adapted to new opportunities and less expensive to maintain. A responsive site also offers potential SEO benefits from using Google's preferred approach to mobile-optimizing sites.
Merchants can capture up to 18% more sales by providing customers access to financing through the Bill Me Later service. And they can offer their customers a smoother, more streamlined PayPal Express Checkout experience, which tries alternative payment options when a customer's credit card is rejected.
Updates available in Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14, give shoppers access to fresher search results because search indexing is performed automatically as the product catalog changes. Improved indexing also helps merchants work more efficiently, because incremental index updates no longer require manual intervention and admin performance is faster.
Merchants operating across regions and geographies can show their customers a single price. Pricing is clean and uncluttered regardless of tax structures and rates that vary from country to country.
Merchants benefit from greater security and ongoing support updates.

New Affiliate Banners Available

To make it easier for affiliates to advertise and market our services, today we have made available a new collection of banners. The banners have been created to have a clean and visually appealing design that should help affiliates attract new referrals and generate more sales. Feel free to put the banners on your websites, emails and newsletters. A range of different formats and color schemes are available.

The banners are available from your Affiliate Dashboard by clicking on the Banners tab.

If you have not yet signed up for our free affiliate program, check out our partner page and learn how you can earn great commissions from marketing our hosting services.

Some examples of the banners are included below:

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