Magento vs WordPress | What’s Best for your Business – Pros & Cons

Leaping into eCommerce can be daunting, particularly without the right information to bridge the knowledge gap. The pitfalls can be deep, and the learning challenging but you don’t want to waste time, energy and money with the wrong platform then have to change or migrate.

If you currently have an eCommerce store or are looking to integrate eCommerce into your platform, you have probably come across both WordPress and Magento – two platforms that can give you the power of eCommerce.

Magento and WordPress represent the two most popular platforms for web development – and pairing them off against each other can be challenging, hopefully after this article you will have a better insight into the pros and cons and can pick what is best suited for you.

Although they are very different platforms they both have high eCommerce functionality and are customizable to do pretty much everything you need. Both are highly SEO friendly (which is essential), have HUGE online support and an eco-system of plugins and addons.

At their hearts Magento is a powerful eCommerce specific platform; WordPress is a diverse and flexible CMS that can accommodate eCommerce.

As companies move into the brave frontier of eCommerce, they are going to need a solution that can support them on their journey from their foundations to a full eCommerce operation working at scale. Magento is for big businesses or at least big dreams and can support your journey from the humblest of beginnings to multi-warehouse, multi-storefront operations with international logistics.

The choice for Magento is the choice for those looking to build an eCommerce business, versus an eCommerce website. A business is much more than a sleek design and great photography, it needs to support your entire value chain, from purchasing and supply to inventory and orders, and returns and customer management.

Magento developments are for the company that is serious about its business and its eCommerce. Magento is the most widely used, trusted and secure eCommerce specific CMS. It’s tailored to eCommerce businesses of all sizes, with flexibility to scale up as your operation grows. Other solutions might suit you today, or even a year from now – but as you grow you are going to need the correct technology to support you.

Magento’s eCommerce centric philosophy and execution means it has an entire eco-system dedicated to helping eCommerce online. Absolutely everything is designed around selling products and growing your business. It can count Ford, Samsung, Nike and Christian Louboutin as their customers.

For all its functionality and capability – it is a little complex for the newbie – you probably could not create a Magento store how you wanted it, without some help from some development skills.

The most popular CMS platform anywhere – powering an estimated 75,000,000 websites including eBay’s blogs (eBay used to own Magento). Typically, WordPress is thought of as a blogging platform but works equally well for eCommerce with a shopping cart plugin and a host of add-ons.

This open-source solution is easy-peasy to use even for novices and you can get your website up and running in a jiffy with an array of templates and plugins. All the plugins and flexibility come at cost however, WordPress is consistently under siege from hackers and if you don’t use management service you will be responsible for patching and maintenance.

WordPress is hyper-flexible, and you can manipulate it to do pretty much anything inside the eCommerce spectrum. As a content-first platform it is great for SEO and intuitive to use. With that being said, you are going to need a pretty comprehensive set of adds on and plugins if you want to manage a full-scale eCommerce operation, addons that will bloat your site, making it slow and laggy without proper hosting and development support.

There is no fence-sitting here: you have two very clear choices. Magento is for the serious business, or the aspirational one; WordPress is for the eCommerce newbie, hobbyist or side hustler.