Magento is one of the most flexible open-source e-commerce applications that comes with lots of desirable features for shopping-cart sites. However, due to these various functionalities, its performance can be a major issue. Magento provides helpful resources in its blog and forum to improve performance including database tuning and server configuration modification. But in many cases, these performance enhancements should be done through system administrators of your hosting company or would work only when you have a dedicated server. Read more about Magento Performance Improvement. An easier way to improve Magento website speed is to turn on GZip compression ...

Use 'before' and 'after' block attributes to change the order of blocks. You can set the position of a block within a structural block by assigning the name of another block to either 'before' or 'after' attribute. For example, if you'd like to put 'Product Viewed' box below 'Cart' box on the right menu, you can define the layout XML files as follows: in catalog.xml <reference name="right"> <block type="reports/product_viewed" before="cart_sidebar" name="reports.product.viewed" template="reports/product_viewed.phtml"/> ... </reference> You can define block position at the very top or bottom by using before="-" or after="-".

Depending on your theme, lists of product short description may appear without any type as in "list-style: none". This happens when the default list style is defined 'none'. Make sure you define list styles separately for product short description, category description or other areas for such styles as a disc or an image. The fix will look like this: .short-description ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: inside; } .short-description ul li { list-style-type: disc; list-style-position: inside; }