As it grows in popularity, we hear some common myths about Magento. This article is all about busting those common Magento myths!
This is part of our talk, “Introduction to Magento”, which we run at events to introduce store owners and web developers to the Magento platform. It’s running again soon in the UK at the inaugural Magento North East event.
1.Magento is slow
There is a common perception that Magento is slow: this is not necessarily a myth, but a misconception: Magento can be extremely fast in the correct hosting environments and with sufficient configuration of caching and concatenation of files.
Clients have approached us with very, very slow websites – one client in particular had a 59 second load time for their home page (As a benchmark, we aim for 2 seconds or less for our clients)! We’ve found that simply moving servers to a Magento specialist hosting company can often resolve speed issues instantly.
So, Magento should not be slow, and if it is, try migrating to a specialist hosting company.
2. Magento is for large scale enterprise-level businesses only
Whilst Magento Enterprise Edition is available, the freely available Magento Community edition provides a huge range of features for smaller businesses, too. You can expect full catalogue, customer and order management tools which have been heavily tested and proven in a vast array of sectors already! Magento is great whether you have 50 products or 50000 products, and can handle everything from simple products to configurable, virtual and downloadable products.
Whilst Magento Enterprise’s features (see also: a PDF list on Magento’s website) offer more ecommerce functionality than the standard Community edition, much of these can be replicated with extensions to Magento designed to be compatible with Magento Community.
Magento have also recently launch a section of its website aimed at SMEs and smaller ecommerce businesses: there’s plenty of resources for small businesses looking for help on the Small Business Magento website.
3. Magento is hard
Another long standing perception of Magento is that it’s “hard”: hard to use, hard to change, and hard to learn. As an agency who have been working with Magento since 2008, we’ve been through this learning curve ourselves! Magento these days, however, is much better documented for both web developers and store owners, and a professionally run Magento training course is an essential for store owners looking to relaunch on Magento.
Any migration of an ecommerce store will create issues which need to be addressed, and migrating to Magento is no different! With the right Magento agency or developer, though, Magento doesn’t have to be hard!