The difficulty involved in building a website depends on what your intentions are, but regardless of that, choosing the right platform is essential.
These days, there are plenty of different options available, but if you’re particularly keen on creating an e-commerce website, that narrows down your options a little bit.
Two of the best website-building platforms that are focused on e-commerce are WordPress and Magento. Both of them provide a variety of different features and services, but they also differ in several ways in terms of the benefits and challenges they offer.
Some of the most important considerations are platform functionality, ease of use, customisation options and scalability. It’s essential to keep all these things in mind when you’re choosing between using Magento or WordPress to design your company’s website.
Understanding Magento and WordPress
Making a decision between Magento and WordPress all comes down to which option will best serve your business’s needs.
Magento is a powerful e-commerce-focused platform that is specifically designed for building online stores. The focus of Magento is to be able to provide exceptional functionality in terms of selling products, handling transactions and managing inventory. Under ordinary circumstances, these processes are difficult and tedious, so Magento makes it ideal for medium to large businesses to deal with significant e-commerce operations.
The site is particularly well known for its robust features. It offers users the choice between a free, open-source version or a paid version, of which the latter includes more advanced features as well as dedicated support for large-scale enterprises.
Now, WordPress, on the other hand, is more focused on its role as a content management system (CMS), and it’s one of the most widely used platforms for websites and blogs. The nice thing about WordPress is that users have access to plugins that can help enhance the online selling process (as well as other functions).
WordPress is particularly well known for being flexible and user-friendly, making it ideal for a broad range of different types of websites, ranging from simple blogs to more complicated e-commerce websites.
Small to medium-sized businesses find WordPress particularly useful and easy to use due to the basic interface and the extensive range of different themes and plugins.
Key Points of Comparison: Magento Vs. WordPress
There are plenty of ways in which WordPress and Magento differ, but some are more important than others.
Ease of Use
One of the most essential considerations is how easy the platform is to use, and generally speaking, WordPress is really well known for its simplicity and intuitive design. Users don’t need technical skills to use it properly, and with a user-friendly dashboard, website owners can manage content, adjust themes and even add plugins quickly and easily.
WooCommerce is a plugin that can be used to set up a basic e-commerce store on the platform, and this is ideal for small business owners or people with limited experience in web development.
Now Magento, on the other hand, isn’t quite as easy to use for beginners. Its complex system involves advanced e-commerce features that have the potential to be more powerful, but they can be tricky to use if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Most people will tell you that Magento is better for businesses that have a technical support team that’s dedicated to familiar web development. And for those who know what they’re doing, Magento provides excellent depth of control over the e-commerce process.
Customisation and Flexibility
Both platforms are open-source and are considered pretty customisable, although WordPress is probably a little more so than Magento. The former provides users with access to thousands of themes and plugins that make it easy to increase functionality, including plugins like WooCommerce which is designed specifically for e-commerce purposes.
Now, as we mentioned, Magento is also customisable, but once again, it requires a bit more technical knowledge in order to do things properly. However, while it’s more complicated to get right, Magento does allow developers to have more control over the design of the online store, as well as its functionality and the overall user experience. This makes it ideal for large-scale e-commerce stores that need more intricate catalogues, product pages and more.
Scalability
Scalability always ought to be an important consideration for businesses that are focused on growth, and if this is a priority for you and your business, Magento is probably the way to go. It’s built specifically for this purpose and it can handle large volumes of products, customer interactions and transactions without compromising performance. It’s specifically designed for growing e-commerce businesses and it can handle heavy traffic.
WordPress, on the other hand, is scalable to a degree, but it’s not really ideal for really large e-commerce stores. It certainly can handle a more basic e-commerce site pretty efficiently, but it can have performance issues with big catalogues or high volumes of traffic.
SEO and Marketing Tools
If SEO and built-in marketing tools are important to you, then both platforms are actually pretty good in this regard. However, WordPress is generally preferred by marketers and content creators because it has a variety of SEO plugins including Yoast that are easy to use and manage. The other thing that WordPress does is it integrates really well with blogging and social media sharing.
In the basic sense, Magento is actually also pretty good with SEO capabilities, but the difference between Magento and WordPress is that if you really want to optimise SEO on Magento, the process is a bit more technical and complex. It includes a load of tools for upselling, cross-selling and other promotions, but they’re a little more difficult to use.
Price
WordPress is almost always the most affordable option, especially for small businesses, since both WordPress and WooCommerce and free. Of course, you’ll still have to pay extra for fancy plugins and themes.
Now Magento, on the other hand, is also free, but you’ll probably have to pay more for hosting, developing and maintaining your Magento store. This is pretty much just because it’s more complicated, but if you’re looking for something with more possibilities, Magento is an excellent option.
