Do you want to integrate your website with few amazing e-commerce functionality in order to grow the business? If your answer is yes, then you will be little confused with the variety of alternatives, which are available to select from.
Well, you do not need to worry about it. In this blog post, we are here to tell you the pros and cons of the two most famous solutions – WordPress and Magento. This post will definitely help you to make the perfect decision for the business.
These platforms are the best when it comes to developing a website within few minutes. If you need an ecommerce website, then both WordPress and Magento have their way of being experts in the field.
Choosing the best platform is important because when you have the traffic; it will be the platform which will be managing most of the things for you. If your platform fails to provide you the best output, then you will either have downtime or slow website, which is not okay for any website owners.
Similarities
Both the platforms are having almost the same architecture internally. They are customizable and this is the main reason for both being highly attractive. WordPress and Magento have their concentration on SEO which is the most important factor for a website. There are a wide variety of themes available for these platforms. You can change the theme in few clicks, which makes both the platforms quite versatile.
These were the similarities, when it comes to the most fundamental difference between the two; it tends to be the orientation the platform is having. WordPress is more oriented for content, and blogs, whereas Magento is concentrating towards the e-commerce platform. Now let us have a look what exactly WordPress and Magento platforms.
WordPress
It had been one of the best open source blogging platforms available till now; even the Google’s counterpart was not able to compete with WordPress. WordPress is also a content management system, and it does its job pretty well. There are more than 100 million websites running currently, out of which a total of 20% of sites are based on WordPress. eBay, the parent company of Magento, also uses WordPress for their blogs.
WordPress was never meant for e-commerce, but as the platform is quite user-friendly and provide easy functionality to add on plugins and customize the template, people came up with some plugins. With the help of these third-party plugins, we can easily convert your WordPress blog into an e-commerce platform. Different plugins which do the job are as follows:
- WooCommerce
- WP eCommerce
- Easy Digital Downloads
- JigoShop
- WP eShop
- WP eStore
- MarketPress
- Shopp
These are quite a few plugins which you can install to convert the WordPress based blog into an eCommerce website, where WordPress was acting as a Content Management System. Now let us look what exactly Magento is and talk about its perks.
Magento
This is also an open-source technology just like the WordPress. With Magento without any plugin, you will get some features which are dedicated to the e-commerce business. The platform is trusted by over 200,000 e-commerce website owners. They offer some customization from the base level to the extreme level. The merchants can quickly set the store, according to their needs. Magento offers multi-store management, which WordPress fails with any of its plugins, and there are many other management tools related to SEO, marketing, mobile commerce which the platform offers.
There are two types of Magento editions available, while on WordPress it is all free. Still, there are some paid plugins which you might want to use so that it will be the same case on the other side. Let us get a brief knowledge about both the editions:
Enterprise Edition: This one is the paid version of Magento, and it provides much higher performance as opposed to the regular edition. If you have a large business and starting with the e-commerce and expect a great response then you must go for this version and it will help you to give much better user experience.
Community Edition: This edition lets you download and use Magento for free, and is for either the small business people, who are currently starting and will expand on once they start getting a healthy amount of response. This edition is an open source, and most of the developers use this version to develop their plugins.
Before selecting one from these two, you have to judge your primary use of the website and how you will be using it. Let us help you with the same.
- Want to have a Multi-Vendor Setup?: If you are looking for something like multi-vendor support then you must select Magento for your usage it will be the best, because WordPress has no plugins supporting this type of arrangement, and if there are some, they will be far from perfection.
- Want to sell Virtual products?: If you are going to do something like selling e-books or subscriptions of some online product, then Magento is not going to be your real help, you must go with WordPress and use Easy Digital Downloads or even WooCommerce both of which offers the same functionality.
- Selling Physical Products: WordPress and Magento both provide this feature, but if you need a better management control over the products than you must select Magento because it is the best in the backend in controlling a high number of goods.
If you are a developer and looking to develop something related to e-commerce than developing on WordPress will be much easier for you, and hence you can easily spend more time in creativity, hence you will find more and more amount of plugins for WordPress, whereas developing on Magento platform is quite difficult for many and is not as easy as that of WordPress.
Once you have all your concepts cleared on how you need to carry forward with the e-commerce platform, you can easily setup one with either of the platforms. We will recommend you to first have a look on Magento by using the community version, and if you feel it useful, then you must go with Magento. If you need a blog along with an e-commerce platform, then WordPress will be a great solution. There are some ways you can use both the platforms. You must spend some time with both the platforms and then decide which is best for you.
