1. DISABLE MAGENTO CACHE
When developing Magento store, you should completely disable all Magento caches to see the changes immediately. After finishing configuration the store, you can enable it.
Go to System > Cache Management. Click Select All link, select Disable in Actions box and click submit button.
After cache is disabled, cache management screen is displayed as follows:
2. REINDEX MAGENTO
If you change data in your store such as product price, add a new category,… you have to reindex data to update data on frontend.
Indexing is how Magento transforms data such as products, categories, and so on, to improve the performance of your web store. As data changes, the transformed data must be updated or reindexed. Magento has a sophisticated architecture that stores lots of merchant data (including catalog data, prices, users, stores, and so on) in many database tables. To optimize web store performance, Magento accumulates data into special tables using indexers.
For example, suppose you change the price of an item from $4.99 to $3.99. Magento must reindex the price change to display it on your web store
Without indexing, Magento would have to calculate the price of every product on the fly–taking into account shopping cart price rules, bundle pricing, discounts, tier pricing, and so on. Loading the price for a product would take a long time, possibly resulting in cart abandonment.
If you change data in your store such as product price, add a new category, … you have to reindex data to update data on frontend.
If a message appears at the top of the workspace to inform you that one or more indexers must be rebuilt, you must reindex data in Index Management.
*Note – Please read more details about Index in Magento in this link: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/ce-18-indexing
3. DISABLE COMPILATION MAGENTO
The Magento Compilation is a feature that allows you to compile all Magento installation files in order to create a single include path. This feature is designed to improve the performance of your online store and is supposed to give between 25% and 50% increase in your page load speed.
Before installing the theme or making any changes to your Magento Installation files, the Magento compilation feature should be disabled.
To disabe Magento Compilation:
Go to your Admin Panel > System > Tools > Compilation and click on the Disable button.
Go to System > Cache Management screen and use Flush Cache button.