Magento – Set Is Anchor to ‘No’ in Category settings have any other side effects other than removing Layered Navigation

catalog-optimizelayered-navigationmagento-1.9

I've been working with a Magento 1.9 shop that has issues with their speed, and I've noticed turning off the 'Is Anchor' in Category settings speeds up the category view significantly.

I understand this removes the layered navigation on the left, which is why the speed increase happens. I'm just wondering if it does anything else in the background I should know about, or any other 'side effects' that I should know about before turning it off on all categories?

As I noticed when I turn off 'Is Anchor' in a certain category the number of products displayed next to the category name goes from 400 down to 11 which worried me a bit.

Some of their category pages even have custom views where the layered navigation doesn't even show but 'Is Anchor' is still set to 'Yes' so I imagine it's pointless being on especially on those categories?

Best Answer

You are right in your finds, the only other thing is that the "Is Anchor" feature switch the way you can navigate the website (by a list of categories or by a list of attributes).

So, if you have products that are not using attributes (color, size, price, etc) they will not show up depending on the option you choose for "Is Anchor". That's why your number of products is different. But this is not doing anything else in the backend that you should worry about.

You can check more here and here

Ps.: Some of the layout changes will be based on the theme that you are using.

Related Solutions

Magento – Layered Navigation SEO

Old question, but in case someone fighting this issue still finds it:

One nice solution to fix the SEO issues caused by the endless number of unique URLs created by Layered Navigation is using the PRG Pattern.

Simply said, it's about replacing the GET request to a layered navigation/filter URL with a POST request (which search engine crawlers do not follow) before redirecting the user to the original layered navigation/filter URL.

This works like a charm, i. e. not changing the UX regarding Layered Navigation and 100% reliable in terms of preventing crawlers from wasting crawl budget on useless duplicate content URLs.

For further details and reading, please see

Magento – Layered navigation filters for grouped products only

You need to rewrite how Mage_Catalog_Model_Layer builds the attribute collection using the current product collection's attribute sets:

protected function _getSetIds()
{
    $key = $this->getStateKey().'_SET_IDS';
    $setIds = $this->getAggregator()->getCacheData($key);

    if ($setIds === null) {
        $setIds = $this->getProductCollection()->getSetIds();
        $this->getAggregator()->saveCacheData($setIds, $key, $this->getStateTags());
    }

    return $setIds;
}

For this context, you'll want to check the product collection for grouped products and return the attribute set IDs of grouped children. These are then evaluated in getFilterableAttributes():

public function getFilterableAttributes()
{
    $setIds = $this->_getSetIds();
    if (!$setIds) {
        return array();
    }
    /** @var $collection Mage_Catalog_Model_Resource_Product_Attribute_Collection */
    $collection = Mage::getResourceModel('catalog/product_attribute_collection');
    $collection
        ->setItemObjectClass('catalog/resource_eav_attribute')
        ->setAttributeSetFilter($setIds)
        ->addStoreLabel(Mage::app()->getStore()->getId())
        ->setOrder('position', 'ASC');
    $collection = $this->_prepareAttributeCollection($collection);
    $collection->load();

    return $collection;
}

You will likely need to deal with the cache key. I would develop with block caching off and then test extensively with it on.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Magento – Layered Navigation SEO

Magento – Layered navigation filters for grouped products only

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