Magento: a beginner’s guide

Understanding the subtleties between Magento and a platform such as WordPress doesn’t come easy for everybody. Although both are popular, there are clear differences that set them apart.

Magento was designed to be the go-to CMS for e-commerce. A Magento website can handle a lot of work in the background while still maintaining a smooth responsiveness. It might not be the best CMS overall, but it is the best when it comes to e-commerce.

To help you better understand what Magento has to offer, here are some important facts about the platform. Why it’s recommended for marketplaces and what you can do with it.

Open source

An open source CMS has multiple benefits. Consider the Magento community edition. This allows you almost complete freedom to edit the code and personalize your website.

Of course, you might need a Magento specialist to ensure proper optimization. There are so many developers worldwide that constantly try to improve Magento’s coding.

Community support is important when working with any CMS platform. And, unlike other communities, Magento’s is a lot more welcoming to beginners.

It has plenty of guides, tips, and in-depth specialty tutorials. You will need to use those if you want to make a splash on the ecommerce scene.

The beauty of a community rich in information extends to the security and maintenance aspects too. It’s becoming increasingly easier to protect Magento sites against attacks.

Not only that, but it is also getting easier to perform maintenance or restore the site to a backup. Maintenance can involve anything from updating product descriptions, to integrating new SEO content.

The reason this is important is that your content should always be fresh when trying to attract new customers. Making sure it’s relevant is up to you. That said, because of how easy it is to track trends and customer preferences, implementing these changes is simple in Magento.

Performance

Why is Magento a better ecommerce CMS? A large part has to do with its superior page load speed. The query processing time also factors in.

Any slight delay on an ecommerce site has the potential to turn away visitors. Whatever it is you’re selling, you want to ensure that you get plenty of repeat customers as well as new traffic. This is why banking on Magento’s high performance is better than the alternatives.

While it may not come with as many templates and plugins as other CMS platforms, Magento is quite flexible. The customization factor scores through the roof because it has the advantage of an open system architecture.

With the help of a specialist, there’s no end to how you can design your UI. Instead of relying on multiple heavy-loading plugins, extensions, and themes, you can offer a smoother experience to your customers by reducing the lines of code.

Integration

Of course, the design and performance factors are just parts of what makes a successful ecommerce site. Magento offers you an easy way of integrating payment gateways, database applications, orders and shipping tracking and much more.

Now, this may not sound like anything new but it’s the way you can control these applications that’s impressive. All it takes is one admin dashboard for you to check everything from inventory to customer records.

This allows you to quickly asses purchasing trends, product popularity trends, and plan for the future. Because the maintenance and operational aspects are easier to handle in Magento, you can focus more on improving your brand and advertising new products.

You also get to use a responsive shopping cart system, multiple marketing tools, and complex catalog-management. It’s also easy to notify customers and display discounts, promotions, and other deals on the check-out page.

Mobile friendly

It’s hard to imagine an ecommerce site enjoying success if it doesn’t offer a smooth UI for its mobile users. Magento is a mobile friendly CMS regardless if you choose the Community or Enterprise edition.

The simple and effective themes can be modified to improve your site’s score among mobile users. This means better performance, optimized content, efficient product placement, and higher search ranking.

Although Magento 2 is also making quite a name for itself, the Magento API still works well enough today. In fact, many of the optimizations found in the new API can be applied to the old API. If you collaborate with an experienced developer that is.

So, not only are you able to offer the same level of support and responsive UI to both desktop and mobile users but you’re also likely to increase your rankings across all platforms. Needless to say, this can help your business grow.

Keep in mind that responsiveness is now a big part of determining rankings for mobile friendly sites. That’s why using slow APIs and themes from other CMS platforms, is not efficient for ecommerce sites.

SEO friendly

These days almost any CMS has at least decent SEO integration. Magento doesn’t exactly outclass every other CMS out there. However, considering all the other advantages it has, this can also be considered a bonus.

Most themes come with preloaded SEO features like URL rewrites, descriptions, sitemaps, layered navigation, and meta tags. By securing the services of a Magento expert developer you can add even more SEO features and of course, customize the existing ones.

Reputation

Last but not least, one must consider Magento’s reputation among top ecommerce businesses. The CMS is popular among Fortune 500 companies which generally use complex ecommerce designs.

Consider that Magento can be adapted just as well for small ecommerce sites just as well as it can be used for enterprise solutions. The ability to link and operate multiple online stores for different locations simultaneously is a massive bonus.

Verdict

There are plenty of reasons why Magento is the most flexible CMS for ecommerce sites. The open source architecture allows it to be used on small and large sites alike. Playing around with layouts and plug-ins is easy enough even without too much experience.

However, after working with an experienced developer, you can be sure that you’re running a stable, fast-loading, mobile-friendly ecommerce site that will draw new customers and create many repeat customers too.