Magento is the fastest growing online shopping platform. This platform was created in 2008 and is quickly establishing. By 2011, nearly 66 thousand sites were dealing with this platform.
People, who manage any organization, sooner or later face the question of creating their website. This topic is especially relevant for private entrepreneurs who, in one way or another, are associated with the trade. Online stores are becoming more practical every day, in some ways even more convenient than ordinary retail outlets. But unlike a regular store, to create and debug the right operation of an online store, you need to have unique knowledge and useful skills. But you can develop an online store yourself. To do this, you need to use any of the available platforms for producing web content. Magento Content Management System is the best choice.
The Target Audience
CMS Magento is created to launch large trading tasks. Using it for a shop with a lot of items is ineffective – just hang out studying and establishing. At Magento, you need to do something big, with worldwide reach or a minimum of uncommon functionality – otherwise why such flexibility of tools and access to the source code.
Functionality
Magento is written in PHP and is open-source, which increases the possibilities for deep customization of the engine. But often this is not essential: the basic setup of CMS has enough tools to launch an online store and handle sales. You can expand the performance through add-ons presented in the official Magento store.
- The engine allows you to create multiple sites and manage them from a single interface.
- Key features of Magento CMS:
- Optimization for the requirements of search engines.
- Built-in marketing tools to increase sales and increase the attractiveness of the site.
- Support for various payment and delivery methods.
- Support for multilingualism, which allows you to create different versions of the site, opening depending on the location of the visitor.
- A powerful personal account of the buyer through which he can manage orders, payment, and delivery, as well as view statistics.
- Granting wide powers to users who can give ratings for forming ratings, leave reviews, make wish lists.
- Built-in system for managing discount programs and promotions.
- Advanced features of product filtering and site search.
- Detailed statistics, which are collected based on data on the work of the store, sales, and behavior of site visitors.
Of course, having these advantages, the system has increased requirements for hosting performance (the infrastructure in which it is located) and for the qualifications of the programmers creating the project. Let’s consider these moments in more detail:
- High requirements for server resources. Magento platform will not work well on cheap servers and shared hosting, and therefore requires installation only on high-quality hosting. However, hosting costs these days are not so high. You will agree that the small cost of renting a quality server will pay off many times during the operation of the online store.
- A small number of specialists who could create a high-quality online store. The Magento system requires highly qualified developers (understanding the object-oriented approach in the PHP language), so you will have to attract professionals to create such an online store.
The appearance of the page home builder made it possible to modify the website content on Magento in visual mode; however, it shows abilities are needed to control the engine. At the very same time, the structure of the system is developed in such a way that it is extremely tough for novices to master it, and experienced designers charge a lot more than to deal with other CMS.
Designs and Work With Templates
After setting up the engine on the site, a standard style is readily available, which is required exclusively to show the abilities of Magento. Then you need to discover a suitable style alternative, upload it to the server, and configure it to your liking. There are complimentary options, but the normal choice will just be if you want to pay for the design.
You can use several design templates in the store interface. This is particularly helpful when creating a multilingual site. You can personalize the design templates so that the screen of the material will change depending on the area of users.
SEO Optimization and Promotion
Technically, Magento is well enhanced for the requirements of search engines. But for premium promo, he, like any other engine, needs enhancement on the part of the user, which relates to content settings. The following functions are offered in the fundamental CMS functionality:
- Filling page meta tags.
- CNC setting.
- Including alt and title for images.
- Automatic generation of a sitemap in XML format with a restriction of the number of pages and file size, as well as concern setting.
- Built-in caching system.
- Short and long description for each item.
Choosing a reliable hosting is just one of the steps to configure the engine. To optimize the engine, experienced developers are also advised to carry out additional activities that reduce the load on the server.
- Use GZIP compression and caching on the side of site visitors.
- Store multimedia content on CDN servers.
- Disable unnecessary Apache and PHP modules.
- Remove extensions you are not using.
- Install CMS updates.
In the latest version of Magento, the developers optimized the database with new query management technologies, so the work is ongoing. But some things, in any case, remain on the shoulders of webmasters.
Advantages and Disadvantages
We have currently said that the main benefits of Magento are functionality and flexibility, which is achieved through open source code and plenty of extensions. Amongst other benefits of the CMS, we note:
- An outstanding set of functions out of package for producing functional online stores
- A large number of templates and extensions.
- Efficient security and performance tools.
- Capability to manage numerous stores from one admin panel.
- PWA support for developing sites that work as an application.
- Built-in page builder with the visual editor.
- Convenient tools for handling goods and rates.
- The distinction of rights in the administrative panel.
- An effective analytics system that permits you to get different reports: on the movement and balance of products, user habits, page popularity, and so on.
Amongst the disadvantages of CMS, we keep in mind:
- High-quality hosting requirements.
- The intricacy of configuration and administration compared to popular open-source CMS like WordPress or Joomla.
What’s new in Magento 2.3
The most recent variation readily available for download is Magento 2.3. The following features appeared in it:
- Two-factor authentication. Now you can use users to verify their identity using a code sent out to the phone in SMS.
- Protect crucial web pages from bots and intruders with Google ReCAPTCHA.
- Advanced cache controls: extra authorizations and gains access to control.
- PHP 7.2 assistance with improved security, increased performance, and access to updated tools.
- Support for PWA, the innovation by which a website operates as a web application, getting rid of the need to create a mobile variation of pages.
- Adding GraphQL Question Language to utilize the API. Its application was due to the increased number of requests in different projects.
- Elasticsearch – expanding the search abilities on the website with filtering by characteristics. Formerly, it was offered only in the paid construct of Magento, now developers dealing with Open Source can use it.
- Multi-Source Inventory – a function for the reliable management of products and stock. It enables you to manage items and their quantity from several sources: shop, storage facility, circulation center, third-party suppliers.
Another extremely crucial innovation in Magento 2.3 – the look of a visual editor. Thanks to it, assistance for dragging user interface items utilizing the mouse appeared, as well as a sneak, peeks of the outcome, permitting users with a low level of technical preparation to customize pages.
The designer assists to produce brand-new pages, modify product and category cards and customize the look of areas of the website without editing the code. You can also insert mini-galleries and widgets to visually present material.