Request A Quote

Session Timeouts

We’re currently fixing a set of issues with a shopping cart created through a different developer for a local client. They did a pretty good job but forgot about session timeouts. A lot of developers gloss over this aspect of their ecommerce site and unfortunately customers pay the price. Sessions are what is created to essentially track you when you first log on to a ecommerce site. This isn’t the bad kind of tracking, this is used for things like keeping items in your cart, logging in and account navigation.

W3C defines them as “A PHP session variable is used to store information about, or change settings for a user session. Session variables hold information about one single user, and are available to all pages in one application.”

By default sessions usually only last 24 minutes (1440 seconds) in PHP websites, or end when the browser is closed. This is fine for many websites and applications, often desired, but not generally a good idea for ecommerce websites. Why? because why would you want to have to put everything back into your shopping cart if you’ve been inactive for 30 minutes. If you close your browser and come back to shop the next day at the same website, you want your items to still be in there, waiting for you, right?

This is a huge potential non-starter for many folks. Even if they use your website once or twice it may promote them to look elsewhere if your website is annoying or making them have to do additional tasks. Luckily session timeouts are easily rectified in a number of ways which usually depend on your server setup. You can set timeouts on-page, in a php.ini file or through server setting if provided by the host. The point is, if you have a shopping cart, make sure your customers aren’t being aggravated by short session timeouts. It’s important.

More Web Design Blog Content

Choosing The Right Domain

Finding the right domain can be a arduous process. That is, unless of course you are lucky enough to find your business name in the exact form you desire. More often than not, obtaining a great domain takes a lot f time, mental energy and cautious anxiety. Will

Understanding Value

At Livewire, we definitely understand what value means. As primarily a B2B driven business we know that value goes beyond a ROI, although that is incredibly important. A proper return on investment is the measuring stick by which most business owners value our services, and that is totally

Lawn Enforcement Agency Has A New Website

Lawn Enforcement came to us in need of some SEO advice. They were paying another company several hundred dollars per month and getting nowhere. We noted that there were many, many site structural problems with their current design and all the probably needed was a new site and

Gainesville Web Marketing

North West Mini Storage and Warehouse is a new client of ours. We started optimizing their site about 3 weeks from the date of this post. Already a page 1 contender, our client now enjoys a surge in search engine traffic – all organic, all of it white

What’s Worse?

What’s worse than these dang North Florida love bugs? Having a poor website, for one. A website should be like the dream employee . It should never call in sick, treat your customers properly and get them the information and the attention the require each and every time.

Redirects & Canonical. What’s The Difference?

There is a lot of confusion about the difference between setting redirects and canonicalization. Here’s the deal. What a 301 says to search engines. Hello, Mr. Search Engine. My page has has moved, permanently, to this other address. If you will please remove my old domain from your

  • EMAIL: web@livewiregeeks.com
Facebook Linkedin Google-plus