You have probably seen many websites on the Internet listing your products in the form of tables (side by side) and in list format (one below the other). And you may have seen some stores in Magento with these formats.

What you might not have seen is that you can change these default frontend settings in the backend. Configuring the presentation format, the number of items listed, the order of presentation, among other things.

Table or List

To make changes to your catalog view in frontend start by going to:

System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog [Frontend]

Let’s know the options that can be configured, and how this affects the presentation of your store.

View Products – Here you tell us how the system should display your products, whether in list or tabular format. With the possibility of keeping the two options available to the customer.

If you have questions about which model is most accepted by your audience, try using the Event Tracking from google and do a A/B test.

Products Per Page in the Allowed Values ​​Table – These numbers refer to the quantity of products displayed per page. Numbers must be separated by commas.

Many users do not like paging, and prefer to load a larger number of products per page.

Products per Page in the Default Values ​​Table – Here you define which of the previously reported values ​​will be your default view quantity. So in the previous item you can have multiple numbers, but only one of these numbers will be the default when the customer visits your page.

This value must be entered in the previous field to be used as the default.

Products per Page in the List of Allowed Values​ and Products per Page in the Default Values ​​List – They function exactly the same the two previous fields, but to List mode.

Arranging the order of presentation

The next two fields allow you to arrange the order as the above items will be listed on the page.

Allow All Products on the Page – The installation default comes as “No“. And depending on the volume of products you have by category, it is best to keep it that way.

However, you can add the “All” option in the combobox that displays the number of products per page – of the field you previously set.

This eliminates paging of your category by loading all products at once. Just check “Yes” – not recommended for high volume product categories.

Listing Products by Order – How do you want to organize your products? By name? By price? By color maybe? Here you can enter the sort order of the results – in the SQL your ORDER BY.

You can also include other attributes in this combobox. Read the post Changing the order of display of the products.

Optimizing charging

In addition to this display information you can also do some performance settings, as we will see below:

Use Flat Category Catalog – Loads all category information into a single table to improve performance in the store’s frontend. Recommended for any type of store.

Use Flat Product Catalog – Loads all product information into a single table, thus improving system performance when loading information in frontend. Magento recommends enabling this option if your store has more than 1,000 products.

By default these two fields are marked as “No” so as not to affect their performance during store creation. But it is recommended that you change to “Yes” when finalizing your store and product listings.

Allow Media Dynamic URL in Products and Categories – By default it is marked as “Yes“, allowing you use “generic” tags to build urls for images and media files. This small “advantage” when developing your pages generates a cost of performance.

So if you’re looking for performance, change the option to “No“. When you make this change, make sure all the images in your theme still work.

If your template/theme is within the standards of Magento, probably the page responsible for listing all these settings is list.phtml that stands for:

app > design > frontend > base > default > template > catalog > product > list.phtml

And inside this file the verification and the construction of the display list/table modes are done. So even though the file name is “list“, it has both the “list” as the mode “grid“.

And who would say such a simple subject would bring so much valuable information huh!?

Success!