Against List View

Published: March 1, 2017

Out-of-box, both Magento 1 and 2 provides the ability to toggle between “Grid View” and “List View”.

A screenshot showing toggling between list view and grid view in Magento 2

“Grid View” displays the products in an image grid, as pictured above. It is the default “mode” for viewing a category or search results page.

In “List View” the products are listed in a single column as pictured below.

A screenshot showing toggling between list view and grid view in Magento 2

Not only is list view unnecessary, it’s also harmful. Here I’ll explain why…

Higher Cost

Supporting two methods of viewing a collection of products means everything needs to be duplicated..

  • Design work is duplicated to account for both grid view and list view
  • Development work is duplicated to implement both grid view and list view
  • Testing effort is duplicated to test both grid view and list view

All these add up to significantly higher costs for the merchant.

Further, bugs are much more likely due to the fact that there are two possible places where they can occur. In my experience it is very common for developers to forget to test their features in both views. These bugs add additional cost to the merchant and leave a bad impression on any site user who experiences them.

Bad For FPC

You may not have also thought about this, but supporting multiple views for a single result set is bad for FPC…

  • Decreases FPC hit rate as there are two possible variations of page that need to be in the cache
  • Increases FPC storage requirements to store both variations of page

This means that the site is more likely to take longer to load for an end user and will be more taxing on your infrastructure.

It’s Useless

I checked Google Analytics and searched for “mode=list” under Behavior > All Pages on a few sites that have list view enabled. Only ~0.05% page views contained that term.

Turning It Off

Grid view can be turned off in both Magento 1 and Magento 2 through the admin panel.

In Magento 2 navigate to Stores > Settings > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Storefront. Set “List Mode” to “Grid Only”.

A screenshot showing how to turn off list view in the admin panel of Magento 2

In Magento 1 navigate to System > Configuration > Catalog > Catalog > Frontend. Set “List Mode” to “Grid Only”

A screenshot showing how to turn off list view in the admin panel of Magento 1

Conclusion

If you have any counter arguments that support the use of list view I’d love to hear them. If, for whatever reason, you prefer list view to grid view, that’s fine. In that case I’d say disable grid view. Basically my argument is that it’s a bad idea to support two modes for viewing your category pages.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to drop a note below, or, as always, you can reach me on Twitter as well.

Max Chadwick Hi, I'm Max!

I'm a software developer who mainly works in PHP, but loves dabbling in other languages like Go and Ruby. Technical topics that interest me are monitoring, security and performance. I'm also a stickler for good documentation and clear technical writing.

During the day I lead a team of developers and solve challenging technical problems at Rightpoint where I mainly work with the Magento platform. I've also spoken at a number of events.

In my spare time I blog about tech, work on open source and participate in bug bounty programs.

If you'd like to get in contact, you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.