A Comparison of Magento vs. WordPress for Ecommerce Developers
If you are currently operating a website, and looking to integrate some ecommerce functionality into it to grow your business, you might be confused with the two most popular solutions - Magento and WordPress. If you have some experience working with WordPress, Magento's complexity may seem quite daunting comparatively.
In this article, we have highlighted why Magento is most preferred for ecommerce development, and some tips on how to use it flawlessly as you do with WordPress.
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From the surface, both the platforms appear almost similar. Both of them are customizable, SEO friendly, can be broadly themed and have a strong online support community. Both are essentially content management systems (CMSs), allowing you to add, modify and manage your contents in the most simplified yet effective way. However, their differences lie in their core purpose.
WordPress
WordPress is an open source blogging platform and content management system. More than 60 million websites or 17 percent of total websites is driven by WordPress. Even websites like eBay, which owns Magento, uses WordPress for their blogs. In addition to being very user friendly, it is also famous for providing an easy-to-embed plug-in architecture and template customization. In other words, the basic ecommerce functionality in WordPress can be achieved through various third-party plug-ins.
Magento
Magento, just like WordPress, is based on an open source technology. It is an ecommerce platform having dedicated ecommerce features that have been trusted by 150,000-plus online store owners, including some of the world's prominent brands, ranging from small businesses to large multinational corporations.
Magento offers a high level of customization and functionality that renders merchants with the flexibility to set up online stores, according to their business needs, and provides rich features like multi-store management, generating reports, mobile commerce, marketing, search engine optimization and other e-retail management tools. Its CMS system also facilitates the creation of complex content pages, menus and version control very much like WordPress.
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Identify Your Website's Purpose
Choosing one among both mainly depends on your website's purpose. Although both platforms are content management systems, it is pretty clear that Magento was built particularly for ecommerce, while WordPress is all about publishing content and creating an informational website. Magento's functionality overall is oriented toward a business structure and selling on the Internet. If your goal is to sell a large number of products online, then using Magento comes highly recommended. Rather, if your aim is to just create a website primarily for posting informative contents and blogs, or you wish to sell not more than a few products online, then WordPress may be a more suitable option.
However, the functionality of the WordPress ecommerce plug-ins is limited. If you would want to integrate different shipping options or multiple payment gateways, WordPress may not allow you to do this. While in Magento Admin Panel, you will find a major part of it is committed to ecommerce capabilities like payment incorporation, shipping methods, stock inventory, price management, order fulfillment and so on. Furthermore, Magento is more secure than WordPress third-party extensions. If you want to see your business thrive, then Magento should be your first priority choice.
Differences in Development
As soon as you begin development, the differences between WordPress and Magento will also become apparent. If you have previously worked on WordPress, Magento may seem complicated to learn due to the differences in terminology and applications. However, learning Magento could be easier if you figure out the similarities between both the platforms, after all both are content management systems.
Templates
WordPress is made up of multiple editable pages and posts. When developing template files, a set of functions and loops are used to call the post and page content. Custom template files can also be created and applied to a single page.
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While Magento on the other hand functions quite similarly as WordPress. However, something that can be carried out through WordPress in a few clicks, the same thing needs to be done in a more programmatic fashion through Magento best practices. For instance, in Magento, you cannot set up additional CMS page templates simply by creating a new template file, but you also need to create a new module that updates the list of templates available to it.
CMS Static Blocks
CMS Static Blocks in Magento functions kind of like a combination of posts and widgets in WordPress. CMS Static Blocks are required for placing text and images on a CMS page or in a template. They act pretty much similar to widgets in WordPress, which manages structural elements and design in a template. Also, note that Magento offers its own widgets too, which provides a higher level of functionality than Static Blocks.
The major difference between the two is that programming contained in WordPress is based on a set of PHP scripts, while Magento is powered by the object-oriented concept, and involves numbers of files and folders. Moreover, WordPress has a unique naming convention, and most files are largely contained in the same folder, while in Magento several files and folders share the same name.
A Robust Ecommerce Solution
Thus, we made it very clear that Magento is the more efficient and recommended alternative to WordPress plug-ins if you want to promote the sales of your online business. These are just a handful of tips for WordPress developers who are struggling to get their hands on Magento. Once you integrate Magento into your business, it will be highly beneficial to you because of its functionality offered, making it a robust ecommerce solution.
