If you are an e-commerce store owner, there are many big decisions that you have to make that can directly impact your company. What products do you need to carry? How are you going to determine the price, and what shipping services will you use? You need to answer all these questions before launching your website correctly.
But before starting the process of designing your e-commerce store or selecting a web design agency to take on the project – you have to figure out the Content Management System or CMS that you want to use. And when it comes to e-commerce, there are two big names that you can choose from, including Drupal and Magento.
Drupal and Magento both provide a fantastic e-commerce platform for digital businesses to establish themselves; they each have unique features and specifications. It would be best to consider which ones are suitable for your organizational needs. You can make a side-by-side comparison of both systems to get a better idea of what suits your needs. You can also see here what the best au online casino can offer to you.
Advantages of Magento
Can Handle a Wide Range of Products at a Time
E-commerce sites that use Magento can handle hundreds of thousands of products simultaneously and can also help run several different stores at a time. Therefore, no matter how much growth you see in your business, you will never have to worry about switching to another platform.
Has a Simple Process of Creating and Managing Catalogs
Magento is designed to focus on e-commerce and has a relatively simple and easy process for creating and managing product catalogs. You can set up different product categories like shirts, pants, accessories, etc., and place your product within them. Magento also provides analysis reports and product management systems to help users manage their concerns and inventories accordingly.
SEO Friendly
Magento is an SEO-friendly platform which means that you can easily optimize your products on the search. It also has an extensive support community on its website where many people can help if you get into any problem.
Furthermore, the website you develop with Magento is responsive, which means your e-commerce store will be compatible with all the devices and browsers. Along with SEO, your e-commerce store will also excel at customer support.
Faster Loading
One of the significant advantages of Magento is the website speed. Nowadays, many websites have a terribly slow loading speed, considering the audience that visits those sites on the internet.
Recent Google statistics prove that 50% of users leave the website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Besides being creative on your e-commerce store, Magento allows you to keep your loading time minimum to accommodate traffic volumes.
Advanced Reporting
Reporting is essential for an e-commerce store. Magento offers various high-end reporting features that provide nearly 20 reports through the web interface. All the significant insights like orders, customers, and products are known by this reporting feature.
The reports continually update to show the latest information, including several orders, AOV, taxes, and collection of shipping fees, the number of product orders and registered accounts, and details about the best-selling products.
Disadvantages of Magento
You Need To Ensure that Your Site Can Handle it
The disadvantage of Magento’s extensive capabilities is that it can place a high load on your server. That means that if you plan to use it for your site, you first need to ensure that your server can handle it. Otherwise, it can become a burden for your site and lead to problems.
Doesn’t offer the Best CMS
Although Magento has great e-commerce features, Magento’s CMS functionality is not the best. That is why most of the site owners who use Magento only use it for e-commerce sections of their website and run the rest of their site on another CMS software like WordPress.
Can Get Slow on Small or Shared Servers
Although Magento provides a faster loading time by default, if you run your e-commerce store on shared hosting, it will slow the speed and lead to a frustrating customer experience. It happens because Magento is an extensive system that consists of more than 20,000 files and 200 database tables, so it needs powerful servers and caching layers to run effectively.
Delayed Technical Support
Running an e-commerce store means that you have to prepare yourself to deal with many security problems or sudden downtimes. Often, people try to get in touch with the Magento technical support team in urgent cases but get late or no response. As a result, your trading may suffer and get interrupted.
Not Much Suitable for Beginners
Magento is complicated for beginners; more advanced capabilities and mass customization has created a real challenge for its users. It isn’t easy to customize the sites made with Magento compared to other e-commerce platforms. If you request any customization, it can take a long time to make changes.
Object-oriented programming or other best practices don’t apply to Magento as it has a complex code and heavy layer that takes a long time to learn and make changes. There is a lot of space available for you to be creative, but utilizing it is not easy.
Advantages of Drupal
Community
The open-source model of Drupal allows for continuous improvement and innovation through the support and passion of Drupal’s community. There are over 1.4 million people who use Drupal in 230 countries that are committed to seeing it succeed.
With such a team of experts regularly working to make Drupal better, the possibility of creating great digital experiences is endless.
User Experience
Drupal offers a unique and fantastic user experience. Its recent versions have prioritized user experience, allowing site editors to content creators to build great customer experiences. Drupal’s user interface enhancements include layer builder, the administrative theme, and mobile responsive web features.
Scalability
Drupal allows other brands to scale their business according to their needs. It has a flexible API structure that supports the rapid growth of content across a global multi-site setup.
It is optimized for several caching modules that support faster page loading, optimized bandwidth, and an overall powerful web performance even in high-traffic circumstances. Scalablity is important if you are running real money online slots for example.
Security
When it comes to building websites or digital experiences, people trust Drupal because of its security. Highly regulated industries like government and healthcare institutions utilize such a CMS for the protection of their data. Businesses that do not adhere to digital security standards are at risk of a data breach, which can cause considerable losses to those businesses.
In short, Drupal takes security more seriously than other platforms. That’s why government organizations like The State of Georgia, Steward Health Care, and Fannie Mae use Drupal to protect their websites and retain their customers’ trust.
Accessibility
Drupal is committed to accessibility standards that prioritize an excellent web experience for all users. Accessibility is necessary for the gateway of any new module and features added to the core. Drupal ensures that all of its functions and features act by the World Wide Web’s defined guidelines, including WCAG, WAI-ARIA, and ADA regulations.
Some of the accessibility features of Drupal include optimized color contrast themes, font sizes, alt tag defaults, control tab order, mobile responsiveness, and aural alerts.
Disadvantages of Drupal
Excessive Memory Consumption
Drupal uses a large amount of memory because it loads its large modules on every request; however, you don’t have to worry about that because it is easy to avoid. The first and best way to balance memory consumption is to order more memory power from your hosting provider, which is very affordable.
Moreover, it would be best if you keep in mind that an increase in the consumption of memory is perfectly normal as long as the functionality of Drupal is growing accordingly.
Drastic Changes with The Newer Versions
Drupal is continuously evolving, and the development approaches are changing at a rapid speed. The steps that developers have to take to keep their heads above the water are unavoidable. Hence why Drupal is evolving so fast. However, due to this, several users have a hard time adjusting to the newer versions.
Low Quantity and Quality of Modules on New Versions
The issue that arises with every Drupal release is closely related to other joint problems. Modules take a long time to become “stable.” Many people complain about a ten times decrease in the module’s variety during global CMS updates.
An essential thing to remember is that the newer Drupal versions bring better cutting-edge technologies to store and manage data, creating a higher quality system as a whole.
Fewer Themes
Many new Drupal users often complain that it offers fewer themes than other content management systems, such as WordPress.
Written in PHP
Drupal is an open-source web content management system written in PHP. However, some people say PHP 5.6 is outdated because, in Drupal 7, there were many difficulties with PHP 5.6, such as language vulnerabilities and the lack of object-oriented style.
Drupal 8 is currently using PHP 7, which solves all the problems by offering better speed, stable performance, object-oriented programming, and extended functionality.
Final Verdict – Magento for Big and Drupal For Small Businesses
Magento is great for large e-commerce businesses that want to sell thousands or millions of dollars in products. These large-scale businesses will need to hire developers to customize their store to their desired specifications. On the other hand, small e-commerce businesses that want to integrate content with their product displays should go with Drupal because it is easy and a bit more convenient. Plus, not to mention the excellent security it provides.