A Look into Choosing Magento and WordPress For E-Commerce Development

A lot of firms when looking to build an e-commerce website are confused whether to go for Magento or WordPress. No doubt both have some unique features and qualities to consider, but how do you decide which one is good for your firm? While there are different kinds of businesses people wish to conduct online, the kind of framework is totally dependent on that. Take a look here to find out more-

WordPress

WordPress is a free open-source platform. WordPress has its roots on blogging and content publishing based on PHP and MySQL. With some great plugin options, you can take your site at next level for building a social network and add numerous features.

If you are looking to create a content-based website, WordPress is for you. It keeps everything organized and has got a lot of features for your blogs too.

Magento

While Magento was acquired by Adobe in 2018, it was owned by eBay previously. Magento is an e-commerce dedicated platform which is a free open source version like WordPress, available to everyone. It is solemnly built for complex online stores which have a wide range of product line. Magento comes with some advanced ecommerce features like discounts, vouchers, product comparison tables and much more. You can find all kinds of extensions and plugins in the market place.

So, Magento is the choice when it comes to building websites with big range of product line.

Magento vs WordPress: Similarities

1. Magento and WordPress are free as they are open-source platforms.
2. To boost the growth of your E-commerce business you can integrate functionalities like blogging for content which is related to your business for digital growth.
3. Both provide Search Engine Optimization (SEO), several customization options for your e-commerce website with fascinating themes and features which are interactive.
4. Both of them are user-friendly platforms, so, these platforms are for you!

Comparison between the two

If you are wondering which, the best platform for your e-commerce site is, read further-

• Security

What’s more important than security in an e-commerce website? Nothing.

Magento is truly built from the ground, to offer a secure way to do business online, which proves it is dedicated to e-commerce. This is really a point to consider. Magento comes with lots of built-in features for e-commerce sites. Which means you may not need to use any plugins because with any plugin or extension, you invite more security risk.

WordPress however needs a robust security plugin even for a basic WordPress protection. If we talk about e-commerce particularly, WordPress is not meant to handle e-commerce transcriptions on a broader sense, being widespread on the web, which makes it vulnerable to hackers. Also, if you are dealing with more products, you will need huge variety of plugins which is again risky.

·       Flexibility

Magento is used for one purpose- selling products online, which shows that it has complete focus on e-commerce but it’s a little less flexible option. Even though there are extensions available for blogging, WordPress comes with a lot of plugins which help you design the exact type of website you want out of your imagination. It provides features like membership portals, online membership, and social media features too.

·       Ease of Usage

If we take a look at both in terms of usability, we can say that again WordPress is ahead. Reason being is genuinely easy to start and set-up. Well, of course you will have to learn but its still easier than Magento. WordPress is much intuitive, and navigation is good too.

·       Cost

Initially both Magento and WordPress are free, but later cost keeps on adding and vary in both cases. When it comes to cost, Magento takes up a bit of investment but pays off with easy scaling and growth. In WordPress however, there is underlying costs as it takes a lot of plugins over time, which means that you will need help. But when it comes to setting up, WordPress is very easy and quick.

If we talk about hosting, WordPress is very less expensive so, if you start with a couple of products, it becomes cheap in long run which may not be the case in Magento.

It completely depends on the kind of website you’re building and how many products you’re willing to sell.

·       Expansion

As discussed, Magento is for multiple product line, so even if you are starting with a few, you can easily expand to more and more products. With WordPress, with limited product line, you cannot think of expanding. That’s why the firms with limited product line usually choose WordPress over Magento.

·       Development

There are still some differences development-wise given the fact that they are both content management systems. The difference is arrangement of files. With Magento, files are segregated in terms of folders of same name and with WordPress all the files are stored in the same folder with unique names. While WordPress is all about PHP scripting, Magento is all about object orientation.

Questions to ask yourself before going for one

A peek in to which one is for you-

If you have more than 1000 products, you will need to deliver goods, you may want to have an invoice for every product sold on your website, you may want to give every single detail about shipment to your customer.

Then you should go for Magento for such complex tasks.

On the other hand,

If you have limited products, you want to add lots and lots of content in the form of blogs or articles to your website very often and want less customization,

Then WordPress is for you.

How about combining both?

Now we know that how both are different from each other or whether to choose Magento or WordPress for your website, but what if you want the features of both in your website? Well that can happen if you integrate both!

How do we do it?

There are few plugins which can help you with the integration smoothly. One great plugin ‘Magento WordPress Integration’ (MWI) makes your Magento site look like WordPress site.