eCommerce Website Agency: How to choose the right CMS for your online store?

Before starting the development of your online store it is very important to choose the right engine or content management system (CMS), various solutions can be used for different tasks and the development cost varies significantly.

Types of CMS suitable for eCommerce development

There are different solutions that are suitable for online store development, some of them are paid and have encoded code, others are absolutely free and have open-source code. Paid CMS is used less frequently than free ones. This is due to the fact of their high cost of the basic version of the engine, need to regularly purchase a variety of extensions and sometimes even pay after sale commission.

Free CMS is used more often and has large development communities, databases, templates, and extensions out of the box. You can find almost any additional extension to extend the functionality of your website, however, not all extensions are free. In addition, when you are using open-source CMS any improvements and changes are possible, if there is no extension that suits your requirements it's possible to implement a unique functionality.

Our eCommerce website agency has years of experience working with both paid and free CMS. The development of online stores using SAAS solutions or self-written frameworks may be a quick way to create an online store, however, such stores will have limited functionality. In addition, with SAAS solutions the code itself is not your property, you are only a user who temporarily uses the engine itself and its hosting. In our opinion, it’s best to use free open-source CMS when developing an online store.

CMS WordPress

Without a doubt the most popular CMS in the world is WordPress, it’s also one of the first content management systems in web development. Over the years CMS WordPress has accumulated the most sites on the Internet. Initially, it was a blogging engine, but over time WP has acquired a huge number of ready-made themes and plugins to extend website functionality. For example, the WooCommerce plugin allows you to build an online store.

Our website agency is happy to use CMS WordPress to develop landing pages, blogs, corporate websites, news sites, or other portals. We can also create an online store using WP, but there are a number of reasons why we do not recommend using WooCommerce and WP. There are many security issues, WP has a great admin panel but it's not comfortable for an online store, also originally this CMS was not designed for stores.

There are also a number of issues with the speed optimisation of the WooCommerce plugin, and more importantly, there are more competitive solutions that are suitable for that role.

CMS Drupal

CMS Drupal is a good solution with huge history and many opportunities for improvement of your website. CMS Drupal has a very big community and all of its extensions absolutely free. Unfortunately, it is not a very common CMS, perhaps this is due to the complexity of the development on it, and accordingly the price of the development.

CMS Magento 2

In our opinion, Magento 2 is one of the best CMS for creating an online store. CMS Magento 2 is a very interesting open-source solution that is designed specifically for building online stores of any complexity and scale. CMS already has a lot of functionality out of the box and a large number of additional modules that can extend the functionality of the website at any time.

Magento 2 has a number of advantages, such as high performance, excellent security, and flexibility. Compared to other CMS it also has a convenient and functional admin panel. The open-source code of Magento allows you to modify and customise the site with no restrictions, and if there is no module or something is missing a unique solution can be created. Online stores on Magento 2 also give its owners an advantage on search engine optimisation as this CMS is perceived more seriously when indexed by robots.

The only downside of CMS Magento 2 is high development costs, but in the long run, this is the most suitable solution for creating online stores! Our eCommerce agency in London has long experience working with both Magento 1 and Magento 2 platforms, we are always ready to create a professional online catalog or a full-fledged online store using CMS Magento 2.

Which CMS to choose for your online store?

There are many popular CMS that can be used to create an online store, all of them have a big difference between convenience, functionality, optimisation, and promotion potential. We have been developing online stores for many years and our team accumulated a lot of experience. If you are not sure which CMS is the optimal choice for your online store contact our website agency, we will be happy to help you!