Struggling with finding the best eCommerce CMS? You are lucky! Marco Bonomo and James Bavington joined us last week to share their opinion on the best eCommerce CMS with us. Read Marco’s summary now to get an insight into your best options.
Where to start
Picking the right CMS can be a daunting task. In the past few years Shopify has broken many records, making the founders billionaires. Magento, on the other side, is loved by developers and SEO consultants and it has retained over time a solid reputation in the Ecommerce CMS industry. Here are my best tips to help you out deciding which CMS is the best – or better – which one is the most suitable for your needs.
1) You must choose, but choose wisely
Quoting the Grail Knight in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, ‘You must choose, but choose wisely’. This means that there isn’t really a CMS that can be recommended to any sort of Ecommerce, but rather different CMS for different needs. For example, if you have a limited number of products and your site is already on WordPress, then WooCommerce is likely a good choice for you. On the other side, you have thousands of products and the turnover of the company is over £1M, then a Magento solution with an in-house developer should be taken into consideration
2) On Shopify, there’s a fix pretty much for anything
Having first-hand experience dealing with a great variety of Shopify Ecommerce, I figured out that even though Shopify has some limitations, there’s a fix pretty much for anything. For example, the limiting site architecture and the lack of access to robots.txt can be fixed through a CDN like CloudFlare, where duplicated collections can be handled by editing the theme. Probably the only thing you can truly miss is having access to log files for SEO analysis, but being Shopify a self-hosting platform, unfortunately there isn’t much you can do.
3) Whatever CMS you choose, don’t go crazy with Plugins
Another recommendation I’m keen on is about handling plugins and extensions. Plugins are indeed making our day-to-day life easier when it’s time to optimise for a particular task (i.e. compressing images), however it’s also true that adding plugins without knowing them well means adding features (and extra code) that can break over time.
4) Pick SEOs and developers with first-hand experience
My final recommendation is about choosing the best team for your CMS. Regardless if you’re picking Shopify or Magento, priority should be given to professionals with already 1-2 years of experience in dealing with the platform, as a ‘live-and-learn’ approach could eventually cause problems down the line.
Thank you Marco for your tips. In case you have missed his talk you can watch it at any time on our YouTube channel, or you can have a look through the slideshow. Share with us on Twitter what you think the best CMS is.
We will see you Mondays and Thursdays at 4pm on our YouTube channel for Tea Time SEO.
Image Credit: Erol Ahmed on Unsplash
