The best CMS for Online store: Why CREALEON recommended MAGENTO in 2023

Magento 2.3 is a CMS (content management system) designed for large-scale and functional online stores. We recommend it for those of our customers who need a powerful online trading platform. Why exactly this one? Let’s look more closely and let’s start with the statistics.

Best CMS 2023

If you google just ranking the most popular CMS in the world it will look something like this:

The bulk of the list, from the legendary WordPress to the less popular Wix, Shopify, Squarespace, and Weebly, are website builders. They allow anyone with little or no knowledge of HTML to make a personal blog or a corporate page. They are great for portfolio sites, where you can see pictures, and then make an appointment with a specialist, rent a car, contact the seller of real estate, and so on. You can even make a small online store on such sites with all the basic payment and delivery features, and sell some kind of handmade or local/selective brand products. Especially if you focus on social media. In general, fascinating, convenient, cheap (if you do not use commercial plugins) and absolutely not suitable even for medium-sized online stores.

Drupal on the fifth line – CMS, which is suitable for creating modern e-commerce web applications, including with unique business logic. We use it for custom projects, and for the online store recommend Opencart (an excellent system with everything you need for small and medium online stores) and Magento, if you need a powerful, large-scale and modern platform for online sales.

And it is Magento that immediately appears in the list of leaders, if you put the question a little differently, and look for the best CMS for e-commerce. This is where these global statistics are updated weekly:

With WooCommerce for WordPress and Shopify, which are still simple builders, you’ll need to pay for a subscription and each plug-in with the features you want. With Magento, you have two options:

• Use the CMS on a subscription basis. As of 2018, Magento is owned by Adobe, and you can use the Adobe Commerce service, analogous to WooCommerce and Shopify, but based entirely on Magento. Cool technological solution with a lot of powerful built-in features, but not yet adapted for the Ukrainian market.
• Create a site with a free license. Together with the open, and therefore free, source code your developers will have all the basic tools for e-commerce: payment and delivery, cataloging, search, optimization for mobile devices, and so on. Plus, you’ll be able to freely add anything from the App Marketplace, our branded modules, or plugins written specifically for your project. In general, if you want your online store to have any feature, it will be there. By the way, you can host your site on Magento Commerce – a cloud service, which is maintained by the creators of CMS. It is inexpensive and since you still have to pay for hosting, so why not the owners of your system. Especially since you’ll get a lot of out-of-the-box “perks” along with it.

If the stats aren’t enough to convince you that Magento is the best “real” CMS for e-commerce, let’s take a closer look at what’s cool about it.

Features of Magento CMS

Magento CMS is a content management system developed specifically for large e-commerce sites. It is a flexible and functional engine, which PHP developers can customize almost to infinity. In practice, there is no real need for this. The base build itself already has everything you need to start selling, and in the add-on store you can download the add-ons you need for free or for a fixed price.

Basic CMS features

Even the simplest one will:

• Be well indexed in search engines, especially after filling in the right data;
• Help you sell with built-in marketing tools;
• Accept payment and display delivery options (with our plugins);
• Support multilingualism, switching between multiple versions of content;
• Collect statistics on sales and visitor behavioral factors;
• Provide customers with a convenient personal account, which will also have a section of “Favorites”, as well as the ability to leave ratings and reviews;
• Provide a quick smart search and filtering of products;
• Allow you to give different levels of rights to administrators, such as sales managers and content managers.
• All in all, with Magento you’ll have everything for comfortable online sales.

Recent Magento additions

Magento 2.3 release, valid for the end of 2021, includes support for many new technologies, the use of which will help make the online store even better:

1. PWA. Every Magento online store is now a progressive web application. It will have a great user interface by default, stable and responsive, regardless of the type of device from which the site is viewed.

2. Search. Elasticsearch is the most powerful search engine for websites and applications, with everything for data storage, search and comprehensive analytics. It’s used even in projects that work with BigData and e-commerce enterprise level, but it will make any online store better. Read more about Elasticsearch in our technology section here.

3. Integrations. GraphQL is a query language that developers have been waiting for a long time to add in order to use the API without “crutches”. And now they’ll have access to these tools, while you have the ability to easily add integrations to your project with anything and not to worry about loads and crashes.

4. Data protection. You can add two-factor authentication to the site to increase user security, as well as ReCAPTCHA to protect against bots.

5. All the best of PHP 7.2. Magento 2.3 supports the most current version of the language in which it is written, and it has many useful tools, including to improve performance and improve security.

6. Controls. Multi-Source Inventory is a tool that can replace your usual accounting program. It will help you organize the management of goods from different sources, and if you want it can easily integrate into your system.

As a reminder, all of the above are things that your developers get access to under a free license and can use to improve your project. The main thing is to find good PHP programmers with knowledge of Magenta, and that’s easy and difficult at the same time. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn how to create websites on this CMS, which, by the way, is the second reason of its small popularity among small studios. But choosing Magento, you can be sure that your project will be handled by people experienced in PHP in general and in it in particular.

Conclusion

Magento 2.3 is a quick start and easy to scale. Powerful foundation, flexibility and functionality. PWAs are perfectly indexed in search engines, especially with the right SEO settings, and also provide users with a good experience. Even the basic content management and marketing tools are enough to set up an effective trade, and a huge selection of add-ons allows you to create your perfect online store.

An online store on Magento is guaranteed to be convenient for you and your customers. Already now the most actual technologies are used in CMS, and with the appearance of new ones, they will be available for you as well.

We at Crealeon have already solved two main problems of Magento: developed ready integrations and modules for UK e-commerce market and actively use them in current projects. For example, web applications Sushiya and Golden Age are only the most famous of the sites on Magento that we made.