Top 5 Clues A Store Is Running Magento

During the week someone asked me if I knew whether a given store was running on Magento. I thought it might be worth documenting my own little set of clues that help me spot a Magento store running in the wild. I’d be interested to hear of other people’s tips, especially if I am missing a really obvious one!

The Cart Page URL

Barring some sort major modification most ecommerce stores will have a cart page, and most will have the default Magento one. So you can identify a Magento store by just looking at the URL of the cart page. If it’s something like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/checkout/cart/

or if they have not got the url rewrites running it might look like this:

http://www.yourdomain.com/index.php/checkout/cart/

The Page Source

This requires you to check the actual page source (Right-click on the web site and select View Source). Once you can see the page source, there are a few dead giveaways that a store is running Magento. Look for the elements and check the src attribute. They will be something like this is a store is running Magento:

The thing to look for is the /skin/frontend/ part of the URL.

Interestingly this will also give you clues as to how they have customized Magento. If they have /default/default in the src URL, then they have possibly just edited the default Magento template files, they’re in for some fun when they try to upgrade!

The Cookies

Some of the clues I have outlined so far could be lost in a big customization of Magento so that you cannot use them to identify a Magento store, but this next one, the cookies, will almost always get results. This is true because a) the stores need cookies to function and b) because changing the name of the cookies would not be a useful customization.

For this one I suggest the very very awesome Firefox extension called Firebug. I’m just going to go ahead and assume if you’re reading a web development blog, you’re running Firefox, you are right?

It is possible to see the cookies for a store by just looking at the cookies in your Firefox cookie viewer too, but Firebug is easier.

When you are browsing around the site, open Firebug and the ‘Net’ tab and expand the GET www.yourdomain.com element to reveal the Headers. You’re looking for either a response Header like this:

Set-Cookie frontend=7f84f718e5bf3d025ac3b6aee1e479a5;

or a request header like this:

Cookie frontend=7f84f718e5bf3d025ac3b6aee1e479a5;

Also related to cookies, often visiting this enable-cookies CMS page will show you the standard ‘You need cookies enabled’ page – which is a dead giveaway too:

http://www.yourdomain.com/enable-cookies

It looks like this:

Enable your Cookies!

The Admin URL

Most stores don’t bother changing the admin URL – which is fair enough – but it gives you the biggest possible clue. If you visit yourdomain.com/admin you are presented with the Magento admin login page, the Magento page title and maybe even a Magento logo.

The Standard Magento Login Window, complete with trademark and copyright.

Some people may customize the login page, but they often forget the page title

Speed

If the store takes longer than 5 seconds to respond to a request, then it’s probably running Mageno – just kidding we love you Magento!

So that’s my list of Magento clues, I’d say you can be fairly sure if 1 or 2 of these are true that a store is running Magento, if you got through the whole list and none of them were true, it probably isn’t a Magento store, but it still could be.

So if you have any easier ways to identify a Magento store, or know of any Magento stores that would beat my test, let me know.