I’ve always had a keen interest in Magento since the day I started working with E-commerce websites. I always felt the systems I worked with never really felt like it was built with Ecommerce in mind and always working around the CMS it was built on. I’ve always self taught alot of my code and I felt that Magento was a bit of a hurdle if I was going to take this on myself and without a need to ever need to work on a Magento site I never got any real opportunites to take on a large scale project in Magento 2.
Working with WordPress & Woocommerce as my 9-5 job for the last 6-7 years I have a clear understanding on how they both work and the limitations of both WordPress & Woocommerce. I’m not saying Woocommerce is bad however it’s certainly not the choice of system for a large scale business or anyone looking for bespoke unique functionality, most developers understand this is a downfall for Woocommerce.
Along came a project from a customer looking for a Magento 2 store, working with Mike we specced out the custom functionality required by the client and decided Magento 2 was the best solution for the customer and started to work with the system. In this post I’ll discuss the good & bad points about transitioning from Woocommerce to Magento 2 from a developers point of view hoping to give the everyday Woocommerce user a understanding of the level of Ecommerce Magento 2 gives.
Searching & Filtering products
Searching & Filtering products inside of Woocommerce is only practicle for very small Ecommerce stores, the minute you start to scale up you realise very quickly how slow Woocommerce really is. If you are looking for a website to be as fluid as John Lewis inside of Woocommerce you can forget that now. The same issue with Woocommerce search the size of a search query really hurts the speed of the website delivering some very lackluster delivery times. Yes there are plugins that improve both of these allowing you to use Ajax however this should never be the answer!
Handing Search & Filtering in Magento 2 is a breath of fresh air, working with a website that has 500 products the search is almost instant, this is due to having Elastic Search interegrated inside of Magento 2. Filtering also is exactly like the John Lewis site previous mentioned, slick, instant and powerful. This sort of speed uninterupts someone browsing the website allowing them to browse the store faster and ultimately making more and larger purchases.
Page Speeds
Page speeds in Woocommerce are horrendus, I’ve seen Woocommerce sites delivering 6-10 seconds a page due to the amount of attributes on a product and the awful. The main reason for the poor Woocommerce speeds are the fact it has to do a Ajax API call per page, this unfortunately is hard to cache without causing errors so it can be very hit and miss on Woocommerce page speeds. Magento 2 handles this with a very advanced cache system allowing you to deliver 1`-2 second page speeds out the box! With optimisation I’ve seen page speeds getting as low as 0.8s.
Easy to use admin
I think I have to hand this to Woocommerce, the Woocommerce admin is alot easier to use than Magento 2
Lack of documentation
This is more of a bug for a developer rather than a user of the store, Magento 2 seriously lacks documentation and Magento 2 developers really do suck at answering questions, they almost love to keep there secrets to themselves and let other developers struggle. Luckily for me I’m surrounded by extremely talented developers so solving hard tasks is just as simple as piecing the puzzle together so this wasn’t a mega issue while transitioning into Magento development.
Built with Ecommerce in mind
Free Resources (Extensions & Plugins)
The big difference between Magento 2 and Woocommerce is the amount of developers that surround both platforms, Woocommerce is just a plugin for WordPress, this being the largest CMS in the world you could shout at the end of your street and find someone who claims to be a WordPress developer, this doesn’t mean they are all fantastic developers who can solve every issue.
Woocommerce has alot of plugins available for solving issues that you come across as a developer most of which slow the site down massively and most developers will advise against but a user saying I would like to be able to do X but not pay a large price to do it will 99% of the time get solved with a plugin. This attitude will not be the case with Magento 2, extensions inside of Magento 2 normally cost between £130-£300 and require a developer to install and integrate with the website. This is both good & bad, the ability for a developer to keep control of the website and maintain it means it’s always very well looked after and no random