WooCommerce Shortcodes

WooCommerce Shortcodes: Make Content Management Easy

Lives of countless site managers were made easy when WordPress introduced shortcodes with platform version 2.5. It is one of the most useful features of the CMS, and has made its way into WooCommerce as well, where it finds a lot of utility. A combination of WordPress, WooCommerce and an attractive ecommerce theme can be used to create a professional online store. With the help of WooCommerce shortcodes, users can create unique pages that have distinctive design and functionality.

In this post we’ll explain WooCommerce shortcodes in depth, what their purpose is and how to use them (effectively).

What are WooCommerce Shortcodes?

The first thing you need to realize is that the shortcode is not a WooCommerce feature, rather, it’s a feature that’s found in WordPress. Since WooCommerce is essentially an extension of WordPress, and also uses its CMS capabilities, the shortcodes feature is naturally available to its users as well.

So shortcodes then, what are they? To put it briefly, shortcodes act like shortcuts that you can use to call a specific function within posts or pages. This can perhaps be better explained with an example.

Let’s consider a shortcode which allows you to embed a Youtube video to your page. Normally, you’d have to copy-paste a special embed code to the HTML of your page. With shortcodes however, you’ll just have to paste something like this:

[youtube-video url=”XURL”]

Now as you can see, the shortcode makes it much simpler to embed the Youtube video. Not only that, but it also looks better while you’re developing your WooCommerce page.

How do Shortcodes Work?

Shortcodes are actually just shortcuts to programmed functions, as they invoke those functions when a web page is loading.

Types of Shortcodes

Shortcodes are written in square brackets as such: [shortcode]. However, there are several kinds of shortcodes which can be used within WooCommerce.

Simple Shortcodes

The simplest form of shortcodes involves just a shortcode within square brackets. For example:

The above shortcode will simply embed an image gallery within a page. There is no way of specifying which gallery to embed, and that leads us to our second type of shortcode.

Shortcodes with Parameters

Shortcodes can have parameters which can be used to specify ‘settings’ for the function they’re being used for. Continuing with our gallery shortcode example, parameters can be specified to sort the images within the gallery being embedded.

[gallery order=”DESC” orderby=”post_date”]

The above shortcode has the parameters ‘order’ with value ‘DESC’, and ‘orderby’ with value ‘post_date’. This means that images within that gallery will be sorted in a descending order according to the date they were uploaded/posted.

Shortcodes with Content

Shortcodes can be used to ‘wrap’ around content, for additional functionality. For example, the caption shortcode can be used to display a captioned image:

<img src=www.logicinbound.com/image.jpg/>Content

With some parameters:

<img src=www.logicinbound.com/image.jpg/>Content

 

How to Add Shortcodes to Pages

You can manually add any shortcode to any WordPress page, and it’s quite a simple process. In the context of WooCommerce shortcodes, you might want to use WooCommerce shortcodes to create ecommerce-related pages.

In this example, we’ll be creating a checkout page using a simple WooCommerce shortcode.

First of all, let’s create a new page that will serve as the template for our checkout page. To do this, navigate to Pages -> Add New from your WordPress admin dashboard.

For this example, let’s name the title of the page as ‘Checkout’.

Now go to the visual editor of the page, and paste the following shortcode:

[woocommerce_checkout]

In the visual editor it should look something like this:

Go ahead and publish the page to view the checkout. Please note that the checkout page will be empty if you have an empty cart.

WooCommerce Shortcodes Plugin

To make life easier, we recommend you to install the WooCommerce Shortcodes plugin so you have easy access to most of the shortcodes we’ll be talking about in this post.

This WooCommerce plugin provides a dropdown button in your WordPress text editor with the shortcodes all ready for you to use. With this, there’s no need to remember the shortcodes and their arguments!

To install this plugin, simply access your WooCommerce/WordPress admin dashboard, and navigate to Plugin > Add New. Here, type in ‘WooCommerce Shortcodes’ in the search box:

The search result you’re looking for should be simply called ‘WooCommerce Shortcodes’ by WooThemes, as shown in the image above. If you’ve found the correct plugin, proceed to install it by clicking the ‘Install Now’ button. After installing it, make sure to activate it!

That’s it! You should now have a tiny dropdown button in whichever WordPress text editor you’re using:

WooCommerce Page Shortcodes

Let’s look at the page shortcodes available in WooCommerce:

1. Cart – [woocommerce_cart]

This shortcode is used to display cart content and the interface for coupon codes and other cart-related elements. There are no parameters for this shortcode.

     2. Checkout – [woocommerce_checkout]

This shortcode displays the checkout page, and there are no parameters available for it.

    3. My Account – [woocommerce_my_account]

This shortcode displays the ‘my account’ section, where the customer can view their placed orders and also update their personal information.

   4. Order Tracking – [woocommerce_order_tracking]

This shortcode displays a form which can be used to check status of an order by entering order details (Order ID and Billing Email).

A useful tidbit regarding page shortcodes is that you can combine these to form a better page for your store’s visitors. For example, combining My Account shortcode with Order Tracking will result in a better user experience as the user can check their order history and check the status of an order from the same page.

WooCommerce Add to Cart / Product Price Shortcode

This shortcode allows you to show the price and picture of a product, along with a ‘Add to Cart’ button. The product has to be specified by its ID using this shortcode.

[add_to_cart id=”99”]

WooCommerce Product Shortcodes

The product shortcodes is one of the most useful shortcodes available in WooCommerce, as it allows you to display products by ID, SKU, category and has support for pagination as well. With the [products] shortcode, there is no need to fiddle with old product shortcodes such as [featured products], [sale_products], [best_selling_products] and such.

Product Shortcode Examples –  Random Sale Items

In this example, we’ll display four random products that are on sale.

[products limit = “4” columns = “4” orderby = “popularity” on_sale = “true”]

The above shortcode explicitly states there be 4 products that will be displayed across 4 columns. If there are more than 4 products, they will appear in the next row. However, in this case, the products will only appear as one row.

Product Shortcode Examples – Featured Products

To display featured products, we simply specify a special argument ‘visibility’ in the products shortcode:

[products limit = “4” columns = “2” visibility = “featured”]

The above shortcode specifies that there should be 4 products that will be displayed across two columns, which in turn means that there will be 2 rows of products (containing 2 products each). The visibility argument specifies that the products should be featured.

Product Shortcode Examples – Best Selling Products

To display top 4 best-selling products, we will use the products shortcode with the ‘best_selling’ argument.

[products limit = “4” columns = “4” best_selling = “true”]

The above shortcode will display 4 products across 4 columns, which will be displayed in 1 row.

WooCommerce Shortcodes for Product Category

The category shortcodes allow you to display product categories on any page.

• [product_category] – Displays products in a specified product category.
• [product_categories] – Displays all product categories.

The [product_category] shortcode can take accommodate the following attributes:

1. ‘number’ => ‘null’ – Specify the number of categories using this attribute.
2. ‘orderby’ => ‘name’ – Specify the order using this shortcode. ‘Name’ and ‘date’ can be used for this.  
3. ‘order’ => ‘ASC’ – Specify how the product categories will be ordered. ‘ASC’ and ‘DESC’ can be used for this.
4. ‘columns’ => ‘4’ – Specify the number of columns the categories will be organized into.
5. ‘hide_empty’ => ‘1’ – Specify whether to show or hide categories with no products. Set to ‘1’ to hide empty categories or ‘0’ to show them.

Why are WooCommerce Shortcodes Not Working? / Troubleshooting Shortcodes

If you copy and pasted a shortcode correctly inside your page but it does not render properly upon publishing, you might need to check if the shortcode has been embedded between <pre> tags.

To check this, open the ‘Text’ tab of the visual editor for your page, and remove the <pre> and </pre> tags surrounding the shortcode:

Source: woocommerce.com

This is a common issue that happens to many users, so make sure that it’s not causing your shortcodes to display incorrectly.

Conclusion

WooCommerce shortcodes provide a convenient way of creating ecommerce pages with minimum amount of fiddling about. Sure, it’s hard to remember all of the shortcodes but that’s why we recommend that you install the WooCommerce Shortcodes Plugin.

If you’d like to see how WooCommerce fares against other ecommerce platforms, check out our comprehensive comparison articles for WooCommerce vs Shopify and WooCommerce vs Magento.

The post WooCommerce Shortcodes appeared first on Logic Inbound.

https://www.logicinbound.com/woocommerce-shortcodes/

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Dental Seo

Dental SEO: Be the Dentist on the First Page of Google

You may think that the best dentists make the most money. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality, the dentists who spend the most on marketing probably have more patients and more revenue than you. Every practice in the healthcare industry is based on patients, so the one who is able to get the most always comes out ahead. Constantly acquiring new patients is especially important in dentistry because of the intense loyalty in the industry. If patients like their dentist, they will be very unlikely to switch. On top of that, they will refer all of their friends and family members, which could dramatically amplify the return for your relatively small investment.

Dentists need to work smarter, not harder by taking advantage of something called search engine optimization, which is commonly abbreviated as SEO in the digital marketing world. SEO is when you change the appearance of search engine result pages on Google by creating relevant, high quality content.

Your potential patients will begin their journey with a search on Google by typing in keywords that are related to your dental practice. However, they may never find you because 95% of them won’t go beyond the first page. Google has become an integral part of their everyday lives and most of them don’t even understand how these search results work.

A typical response is to assume that dentists on the first page are somehow better than dentists who aren’t. The truth is that these dentists are only making more money than you because they spend more on SEO services. You could be the best dentist in the world, but your practice will fail if you don’t hire a dental seo company like Logic Inbound to manipulate search results for you.

SEO is simply a way of answering search queries by giving users exactly what they want. These patients really want dental services, but they don’t have a price point in mind. As a dentist, you can simultaneously invest a little bit more money in SEO services and charge significantly higher prices for dental care because your patients who find you on Google won’t consider the alternatives on the second, third, fourth, or any following pages.

There is no reason why you should feel guilty for charging higher prices because your patients are essentially willing to pay more for convenience. Most of these additional price increases will also be covered by insurance, so your patients may not even pay attention to their final bill. The real takeaway is that if online advertising didn’t work, no one would ever use it and Google wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar company. So why not invest in the future by hiring Logic Inbound? We can take your practice to the next level of success through time tested services that have worked for doctors, whose practices are very similar to those of dentists.

Our SEO experts at Logic Inbound increased Dr. Kate Kass’s patients by over 1,000% in 15 months through SEO on Google. We will walk you through the exact tactics and techniques that we used, so that you will be able to get more patients as well. If you ever need help, you can call us at (206) 800-7756.

Dr. Kate Kass ranks on the first page for 20 high intent keywords across a dozen services. This drove 1,700 qualified prospective patients to her website last month. Imagine the potential if over a dozen of your most expensive services ranked for keywords where people were likely to buy.

Disclaimer: Kate Kass may be a doctor, but the SEO strategy for helping dentists rank on Google is very similar. Although the following keywords may not be exactly what your patients are searching for, they will be customized to meet your needs if you decide to pay Logic Inbound for SEO services.

How SEO Marketing for Dentists is So Effective

You could rank on the first page of Google just like Dr. Kate Kass if you implement five SEO techniques. The main advantage for spending your marketing dollars on SEO is intent. By intent, we mean that people are already willing to buy if they are searching for your dental practice. Alternatively, you could spend your entire marketing budget on Facebook advertisements, but then much of your investment would be wasted on people who are not currently interested in dental care. The key is reaching patients with the right message when they are ready to buy. The dentists on the first page who do that are literally raking in millions of dollars from acquiring new patients constantly while you’re barely paying off your student loans.

1. Keyword Research
2. On Page Optimization
3. Content
4. Site Structure
5. Backlinks

Perform Keyword Research to Find SEO Keywords for Dentists

Keyword research is used to target variations of different searches because not all of your patients will use Google in the same way.Your patients could search for generic terms, symptoms, or even various specific treatments. Regardless of your patients’ method for searching on Google, you want to make sure that you are the first dentist who shows up to help them with their problems.

Take a look at a Microsoft Excel report of Dr. Kate Kass’s first page keywords:

 

Now picture your practice on the first page of Google for services that are in great demand and are often covered by insurance.

This report could be showing your practice after working with Logic Inbound

Generic searches for Dr. Kate Kass’s practice looked like this:

Generic searches for your practice might look more like this:

Symptom searches for Dr. Kate Kass looked like this:

Symptom searches for your practice might look more like this:

Specific treatment searches for Dr. Kate Kass looked like this:

Specific treatment searches for your practice might look more like this:

On Page Optimization is the Best SEO Trick for Dentists

You will need to create content on a dedicated page for each search that your patients make, so that you can promote your own treatments as the cure to their symptoms. For example, if you search for dentists on Google, the first search engine result page should display pages that have keywords for dentists. Similarly, if you search for orthodontists on Google, the results will be dominated by pages that include keywords for orthodontists. You will almost never see a dentist page ranking for the orthodontist keyword and vice versa. You can perform your own search on Google to confirm this for yourself. This process happens because the pages with more relevant content replace the pages with less relevant content in overall rankings.

This is not a coincidence because dental seo companies like Logic Inbound have inserted these keywords in specific places, like URLs, meta titles, and meta descriptions, on pages to help websites rank higher on Google.  

Google Search Engine Result Page for “dentist seattle” as a keyword:

Let’s try this again to prove that we aren’t just using one specific example. Try searching for “orthodontist seattle” on Google. You’ll see that North Seattle Orthodontics has used the keyword they want to rank for, “orthodontist seattle” better than their competition across the URL, Meta Title, and Meta Description.

Google Search Engine Result Page for “orthodontist seattle” as a keyword:

You can implement on page optimization on your own by adding the name of the city, in which your business is located, and the keyword, for which you would like to rank, to the URL of your web page. The meta title for your web page should include the keyword, two variations of the keyword, and the name of your brand. After that, you could write a meta description that starts with the keyword and includes at least two variations of the keyword. Finally, the H1s on your web page should include your keyword embedded in a phrase and your H2s should be variations of that keyword.

Again, you should note that top results are paid advertisements.Yelp is actually a listing website, which makes it much harder to beat in rankings. However, Logic Inbound was able to beat Yelp by employing a variety of SEO strategies.

When we say that Google values relevancy as a major factor in rankings, we mean that the algorithm looks at specific places on your page. You can make your pages as relevant as possible by inserting the keyword that you want to rank for in the URL, meta title, meta description, h1, and h2s on the dedicated page for that keyword:

Say that you perform a search for “dentist seattle.” The top search results with the word, “ad,” in them are actually advertisements. You will have to use Google AdWords (now called Google Ads) to get instant results like those, but you will have to pay for each click instead of monthly for SEO services. According to WordStream, clicks on Google Ads can cost between $1 to $60 depending on how much competition there is for a particular keyword and the average conversion rate for health & medical services is 3.36%.

Average Cost Per Click on Google AdWords (now called Google Ads) by Industry:

Average Conversion Rate on Google AdWords (now called Google Ads) by Industry:

SEO vs. Google Ads Pros & Cons

SEO Pros	1. With SEO, website traffic will continue once you stop paying Logic Inbound.	1. Logic Inbound bills for SEO services at an easy monthly rate.
SEO Cons	2. It will take awhile for you to see results with SEO.	2. You won’t be able to manage your own SEO campaigns.
Google Ads Pros	1. Your results from Google Ads will be instant.	1. You will directly pay for every individual sale with Google Ads.
Google Ads Cons	2. Website traffic goes away once you stop paying for Google Ads.	2. You might spend so much on Google Ads that you actually lose money.

Dentists Need To Create High Quality Landing Pages

Now that we have covered relevancy, it’s time to create a landing page with high quality content for each keyword that you’re targeting.

Google’s algorithm was built to value one major thing in determining search results for a particular query: relevant, high quality content. If the algorithm didn’t focus on relevant, high quality content, then people would stop using it and Google would lose billions of dollars in online advertising revenue to other search engines like Bing. In other words, there is no reason why people would use a search engine if it doesn’t help them find the information for which they have been looking.  

However, relevance and quality are measured in terms of degree, so you don’t necessarily need to have the most amazing dental content ever to rank on the first page. Google just needs to recognize it as better than the local competition if you want to outrank them.

You may be wondering how Google knows what content is better. It honestly doesn’t know for sure since artificial intelligence hasn’t become sentient yet. Google determines quality by tracking user engagement metrics from human interactions on pages, such as time spent on site, bounce rate, pages visited, and overall engagement with the site.

The easiest way to drive better user engagements is add more content to your landing page. How much content do you need to add? It depends on the competition, and blend of relevance scores and the strength of your domain and theirs.

To error on the safe side, it’s best practice to have more content than any site on the 1st page. Generally this is 2,000 words for dentist landing pages.

You can count the number of each words on every site on the 1st page automatically using our SEO tools.

The next best way to increase user engagement metrics is through structured data. Structured data includes things such as:

• Lists
• Bullet Points
• Tables
• Table of Contents
• Imbedded YouTube videos
• And external citations

Let’s take a look at one of North Seattle Orthodontics’ landing pages for invisalign since they rank at the tops of the first page of Google for the following keyword:

You’ll see that the page has:

• 717 words
• 2 embedded videos
• 2 embedded images
• 1 Set of bullet points
• 1 quote
• 4 outbound citations.

This page has almost every kind of structured data and is designed to keep users on the site for as long as possible.

Good Landing Page Content

On the other hand, you will see how the invisalign landing page for Riolo Orthodontics, has a lower ranking for the following keyword:

This is because it doesn’t include this long form content and structured data. Users will be much less likely to spend time on his site because the content is too short. They will also have higher bounce rates, fewer pages visited, and less engagement with his site overall.

Bad Landing Page Content (Found on page 10 of Google for the keyword):

Site Structure is One of Many Actionable SEO Tips for Dentists

Site structure is probably the easiest SEO activity to implement for novices. Simply link to each landing page in the header and footer navigation menus.

This will transfer the power from your homepage to your landing pages, ensure Google is able to find and index your landing pages, tell Google that these are the most important, and relevant pages to your business, and makes it easy for visitors on the homepage to jump to where they want to go

Seattle Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery ranks on the first page of Google for “oral surgeon seattle” and obviously took their site structure seriously as you can see from their amazing header and footer navigations. By this, I am referring to the options that you can click on at the top and bottom of the page.

Good Example Header Navigation:

Good Example of Footer Navigation:

Local SEO for Dentists with Backlinks, Directories, and Outreach

Backlinks are actually least important activity for ranking and you should only use them after you have completed the rest of the activities in this guide. If you build backlinks before your pages are optimized for quality and relevance, then you probably won’t be satisfied by the results. You also can’t build backlinks to light content that isn’t relevant and expect to rank. That is why suggest that you perform keyword research, optimize your pages, and write content first.

Social Backlinks Are an Easy Way to Learn SEO for Dentists

Social backlinks are backlinks from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram. You can take advantage of social backlinks by setting up accounts on all of the major social networks and linking back to your website. As you can see from the Facebook page for Dental Care Seattle, which ranks at the top of the first page of Google for “dentist seattle,” there are links under additional contact info. We call these social backlinks because they are links on a social media profile that link back to your website.

There are hundreds of social networks you can receive backlinks from. Get creative, think places like YouTube, SoundCloud, and any platform that has a public profile that Google can crawl.

Directory Sites Are a Great SEO Service for Dentists

Social backlinks aren’t going to take you all the way to the first page,you also need directory backlinks, which are like online phone books for businesses that can link back to your website.  Yelp, Glassdoor, and niche specific industry sites such as DentistDirectory.com are all examples of directories. You can set up accounts on each of these and link back to your website whenever the directory content is relevant. By relevant, we are referring to how you probably shouldn’t link from a page or directory about doctors when you are a dentist and so on.

DentistDirectory.com

DentalDirectory.com

Here is what a typical listing looks like:

Podcast and PR Outreach is Our Last SEO Tip for Dentists

Our final backlinking strategy is the most difficult and time consuming, but also the most powerful and impactful. It involves creating a list of industry publications that are relevant to dentists, and reaching out them one by one, pitching yourself as an expert and offering to contribute content to their website.

This works because dentist publications always want free, high quality content for their readers, and you’re an expert who would love to share your thoughts on a thing or two about dentistry.

Write 1,000 words of high quality content that you are uniquely positioned to write about, and include one or two links back at the landing pages you want to rank.

Here is an example pitch we used for Dr. Kate Kass to create a guest post opportunity:

Hey y’all,

I’m Dr. Kate Kass, a local functional medicine specialist and holistic physician in the Seattle area.

I was reading one of your articles when I noticed you accept guest posts.

I’m reaching out because right now I’m working on some pieces surrounding men’s health, hormones, and fitness, and I’d love to write for your site!

My skill set focuses on naturopathy, age management, regenerative medicine, and sexual health. I began my practice in 2014, working out of a shared clinic with other doctors. Today, I have my own growing practice with multiple nurses and am looking for doctors to work under me. This all makes me very confident that I can provide a valuable contribution to your website.

If you still accept guest posts, please let me know – I’d love to put together a draft for your review!

Thanks,

—

Kate Kass – Website

If you’ve been able to follow this guide and implement the rest of our best practices for dentists, but hit a wall here. Contact us, we’ve perfected this process at scale and are happy to step in and take over.

Should Dentists Blog for SEO?

We see a lot of dentist and healthcare companies investing into blog content, but you need to understand that blogging does not help with your SEO, nor does it help you create awareness with new patients.

Content on a dentist’s blog will not drive qualified prospects, because the keywords blog posts primarily rank for informational searches.

An informational search will not display search results from local businesses, but will display search results from websites all of the country. This means if your blog post does rank for a an informational search, that it’s likely the searcher lives in a different city than your dentist practice is located.

A good example of a national search is “how to whiten teeth?”

Note that none of the search results are local dentists, it’s all websites located across the country. Ranking for these type of informational queries are pointless for driving new patients.

With that said, blog content is great at building trust and credibility with prospects who have found your website via one of your marketing channels.

Here is how to leverage blog content:

1. Send them information on your blog after they have given you their contact information
2. Re-target the prospect with informational content on your blog after they have left your website with a Facebook pixel

However, that same investment in content will build 10x the trust and credibility if the content you write is hosted on an industry leading publication’s website.

Keep reading to learn how to get your name on the biggest websites in dentistry.

Recap

We speak from experience. This is how we have helped hundreds of local business like your own rank on the first page of Google. If you liked what you read and you would like to learn more, you can contact us directly at sales@logicinbound.com or (206) 800-7756 to get a response within 24 hours.

Quality Content

1. The content on each of the landing pages you want to rank should be at least 2000 words long
2. The content should  include at least 5 of the following: lists, bullet points, tables, imbedded YouTube videos etc.
3. Blog posts help build trust and credibility with existing prospects, not generate new prospects
4. Focus your efforts on getting your informational content on industry leading publications

Relevance

1. The URL for each of your web pages should look like this: https://nameofmydentalpractice.com/nameofservice-nameofcity

URL Example:

      2. The meta title for each of your web pages should look like this: name of service | first variation of service | second variation of service | name of dental practice

Meta Title Example:

     3. The meta description for each of your web pages should look like this: name of service…blah…blah…blah…blah…blah…blah first variation of service blah…blah…blah second variation of service blah…blah…blah…blah.   

Backlinks

1. Create social backlinks
2. Create directory backlinks
3. And if that’s not enough to rank you, get backlinks from authoritative dentistry publications

If you liked what you read and you would like to learn more, you can contact us directly at sales@logicinbound.com or (206) 800-7756 to get a response within 24 hours.

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https://www.logicinbound.com/dental-seo/

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Magento 2

Magento 2 – The Latest Version of Magento

The release of Magento 2 was always going to be a big deal. Its predecessor, Magento 1, faced stiff competition from increasingly popular platforms such as WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce and Volusion, just to name a few. Sites created using Magento 1 were notoriously difficult to create and maintain, and would routinely present site owners with new challenges.

In 2016, Magento 2 was finally released with hopes that it would reinstate the platform as the go-to for enterprise and small-to-medium businesses (more on this later on).  Reactions to Magento 2 have been mixed, to say the least, and in the 2 years that it has been available only 64,000 ecommerce sites have been using it. This isn’t bad by any means, but it also isn’t entirely convincing.

For users who’re deciding which ecommerce platform to use for their store, the sheer amount of choice can be inundating. What compounds this problem is that there are now several excellent ecommerce platforms available.

In this article we’ll be talking about the Magento 2 platform and whether it should be on the list of considerations for your ecommerce site.

Before we jump into Magento 2 however, it is important that we discuss why Magento as a platform got so popular.

Magento: An Overview

Magento vs the World

These days users can choose from several platforms to built their ecommerce site on. Popular choices include Shopify, BigCommerce, Wix and Squarespace (with Shopify being the most capable, in our opinion). All of these are very capable solutions no doubt, and they all have one thing in common: they’re SaaS products.

Being SaaS products, they’re very easy to set up and use – to the point where nearly anyone can use them to build a professional ecommerce store. They also happen to be very cost-effective when it comes to ecommerce. We recently published an article detailing the costs involved in WooCommerce store development, and those were in the region of around $700 / year even for the most barebones store. Hosted solutions like Shopify on the other hand, can cost as less as $290 / year. This makes it abundantly clear why hosted solutions are simply exploding in popularity.

Just Magento Problems

Magento, like WooCommerce, is a self-hosted ecommerce platform. That means that the store owner is responsible for its installation and deployment on a hosting server. What’s more, after it has been deployed it’s not exactly the easiest platform to work with.

It has a steep learning curve and requires a certain level of skill from developers. Getting comfortable with its concepts, terminology and quirks can take a long while and require serious investment on part of the developer. Compounding the problem is that Magento 1 has a woeful lack of documentation.

Because of this, Magento developers tend to be expensive, and prohibitively so. The costs involved in developing a Magento site can often surprise even the biggest companies, and this is where hosted solutions such as Shopify tend have a significant advantage. However, it’s not all bad news for Magento.

Magento’s Edge

Popular SaaS solutions such as Shopify and BigCommerce might offer an easier way to get your ecommerce store off the ground, but for complex ecommerce operations these platforms can pose severe limitations in terms of features and functionality. Magento on the other hand is open-source, which makes gives it the kind of extensibility that hosted platforms cannot hope to match.

With Magento, merchants can fine tune critical aspects of the system such as hosting, database usage, caching and so on. Also, with Magento the merchant is not at the mercy of support handled by a single organization. Merchants can research which agencies provide the best support and then choose to go with them. SaaS solutions are undoubtedly ahead when it comes to upfront costs and convenience, but as your business grows and the demand for complex features arises, their inherent limitations are immediately exposed.

While Magento is a difficult platform to work with, its modular structure and robust architecture have made it a favorite for enterprise operations where integrations with internal systems such as CMS and ERPs are an absolute necessity. It also has support for plugins, which coupled with its strong development community has led to the development of more than 3000 of these. It’s easily ahead of competitors when it comes to the number of plugins available.

To Install or Not to Install a Magento Plugin?

Magento’s strong plugin support might seem like a strong point at first but consider this: this is a platform that’s notoriously difficult to work with. As such, most plugins have been created by developers who’re simply not fully familiar with the deep intricacies of the platform. It’s quite normal for extensions to clash with each other, often wreaking havoc with the stability of the website.

The Need for Magento 2

Over 400,000 ecommerce sites are powered by Magento all over the world. While it’s certainly not lacking in popularity, it has seen stagnant growth over the past few years. Most of that can be attributed to the rising popularity of convenient SaaS ecommerce products. Moreover, Magento 1 isn’t exactly cutting edge either. Below we’ll discuss some of the factors which necessitated the development of Magento 2.

1. Terrible Documentation

Magento is hard enough for developers to get used to as it is, but it’s really the lack of proper documentation that makes it worse. Due to this, developers often had to undertake expensive and time-consuming training courses, debug problems themselves (which again takes a lot of time), coordinate with other Magento developers on forums and in some cases going so far as to reverse-engineer the platform in order to get a better grasp of it.

2. Performance Issues

Magento is a complex system and struggles to keep up with itself. In the past few years, Magento have worked hard to improve the platform, even if it meant refactoring entire subsystems. Optimizations like asynchronous indexing were introduced quite late and the all-important Full Page Cache support was limited to the $1800 / month Enterprise Edition. Merchants tried to get around this using so-called performance-enhancing plugins but they brought along problems of their own.

3. Complicated Scaling

Magento relies heavily on database calls, and that’s where one of the platform’s major bottlenecks lies. Magento 1 did not have native support for shared caching for a long while, nor was there any native support for splitting databases across multiple instances. This creates issues like poor scaling and if the database fails, the system will crash in case a fail-safe has not been deployed.

4. Poor User Experience

Magento’s user interface looks like something out of the 80s and is needlessly complex to understand and navigate. Doing something as simple as uploading images requires too many steps, resulting in a cumbersome user experience. This developers-only interface is one of the weakest aspects of Magento 1, and one of the reasons why it has been overtaken by beautifully-designed platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce.

Magento 2 vs Magento 1 – The Improvements

The goal of Magento 2 was not just to overcome the shortcomings of its predecessor, but to attract a new audience demographic. A demographic that has so far been likely to use platforms like Shopify. In order to do so, the following are the improvements Magento 2 brings over Magento 1.

1. Extensive Documentation and Support Material

Magento 2 comes with comprehensive documentation, covering nearly all aspects of the platform, targeting front-end developers, backend developers, solutions specialists and Magento administrators.

The entire codebase of Magento 2 is now published and maintained on Github, providing much needed visibility into its code, as well as providing a convenient way to report and track bugs.

Magento Inc. has also launched free online courses for Magento 2 in a bid to attract more developers.

2. Better Performance and Scalability

Magento 2 brings with it one of the most surprising feature additions – Full Page Caching. This feature has a huge impact on the performance of the platform, and in a good way. What’s surprising about this addition is that Full Page Caching was offered only on Enterprise Edition of the original Magento (which costs $1800 / year).

MySQL (much to the ire of purists) is still the platform’s native querying language, but the way databases are handled has been significantly reworked. There’s now native support for data-splitting, which allows data to be split depending on which area of the application it is being used for. This allows for data to be kept on different servers, thus increasing the robustness of the system as a whole, as well as providing a much-needed performance boost.

Magento 2 also comes with out-of-the-box support for PHP7 and HHVM (both offering significant performance improvements for PHP code parsing).

3. Support for Modern Web Technologies

Magento 2 comes with support for modern web technologies like HTML5 and CSS. It also has a declarative templating system along with Model-View-View-Controller (MVVC) programming patterns.

4. Better Dashboard Designed for Non-Technical Users

The backend dashboard has been completely redesigned keeping in line with modern usability principles. It’s still not the most user-friendly dashboard in the world, but it’s a huge step forward from its predecessor’s stone-age ‘control center’.

With Magento 1, tasks as mundane as bulk-editing products required a call to the entire development team. Now however, the dashboard features an interface that has been designed keeping in mind non-developers. As such, there’s less need for merchants to have an inhouse developer at all times to do simple tasks such as adding new products.

Some other notable dashboard improvements include:

• Optimizations for a variety of screen sizes, which means the dashboard will render much better on mobile devices
• Better menu system
• Convenient product management

Having a user-friendly interface gives Magento a better chance of competing against popular enterprise ecommerce solutions such as Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise. Having an interface which is easy to get to grips with is important, as companies can choose to train less experienced resources to do repetitive tasks.

5. Native Support for Popular Payment Gateways

Magento 2 comes with Day 1 support for popular payment gateways such as:

• PayPal
• Braintree
• Authorize.net
• WorldPay (Enterprise Edition)
• CyberSource (Enterprise Edition)

Convenient checkout with popular payment gateways gives your store and customers a lot of flexibility. What’s more, development time is not wasted unnecessarily trying to integrate these common payment gateways.

Magento 2 Developer Challenges

While Magento 2 is a worthwhile upgrade over its predecessor, it does present its own unique challenges that developers must face. Below we’ll be listing some of the more glaring issues with the platform.

1. No Backwards Compatibility with Magento 1 Themes

Support for modern web technologies is definitely a win for Magento 2, but there’s also the issue of theme porting. Currently, there’s no way of transferring / porting your Magento 1 theme to Magento 2. There’s no other option but to build your Magento 1 theme for Magento 2 from scratch. Of course, you can save yourself a lot of time by buying a Magento 2 theme, but then your store will lose its familiarity in front of customers.

For merchants who’ll be creating a theme for their Magento 2 store from scratch, the good news is that the platform comes with a blank theme by default, which serves as a great canvas to build and customize.

2. No Backwards Compatibility with Magento 1 Extensions

Not all of the extensions that developers have come to appreciate on Magento 1 are available on Magento 2. This also poses a challenge for merchants who’re considering migrating as they’ll likely have to repurchase extensions and then hire resources to integrate them with the Magento 2 site.

This is a big deal, as Magento 1 plugins aren’t exactly cheap and repurchasing similar plugins for their Magento 2 site creates hesitancy for merchants.  Also, not all Magento 1 extensions will be ported over to Magento 2. Developers are still getting accustomed to the Magento 2 platform and that means we’re still not at a point where the plugin marketplace for Magento 2 represents any kind of threat to thriving plugin ecosystems for competitors such as Shopify Plus.

3. Magento 2 Enterprise Edition Is More Expensive

If the cost of repurchasing plugins wasn’t enough, the fact that Magento 2 Enterprise Edition costs a whole $4000 more per year will certainly make merchants think twice before migrating from Magento 1.

With Magento 1, the subscription cost for the Enterprise Edition was somewhere around $18,000 per year. With Magento 2 Enterprise Edition, that figure jumps up to $22,000 per year. This increase in licensing fees is quite significant (almost 22%) and is enough for some merchants to simply stay with Magento 1.

Magento 2 Themes

Magento 2 is still catching up when it comes to third-party developer support and the number of themes available for the platform and its predecessor is a direct indicator of this.

For example, if you go to a popular theme marketplace such as Template Monster, you’ll find that there are 344 premium themes available for Magento 1, while just around 100 for Magento 2. And remember, Magento 2 isn’t just up against its older version, it’s up against fierce competition from Shopify, which has hundreds of high quality premium themes available.

Still, this isn’t to say that there are no good themes available for Magento 2 – quite the opposite is true in fact. In our rundown of the best Magento themes, we listed several Magento 2 themes that can be used for a variety of ecommerce niches.

Magento 2 Extensions

Magento’s open-source and extensible nature has always been one of its strongest points, because it has the platform has one of the largest selection of plugins in the market today. Compared to accomplished and popular platforms like Shopify, Magento still holds its ground quite respectably.

What’s surprising perhaps is the fact that Magento 2 – a platform that is just a couple of years old – has already surpassed its predecessor in the number of plugins offered. There are more than 2200 Magento 2 plugins available right now on the official Magento Marketplace.

Magento 2 Popularity – Has it Caught On?

Magento 2 was released to overcome the many shortcomings of its predecessor, so has it caught on? Has Magento 2 been successful in its adoption by non-developers? Well, the numbers paint an unconvincing story at the moment.

Data from Builtwith shows that there are currently just 34,000 Magento 2 stores live across the world. On the hand its predecessor – Magento 1 – is still going strong with more than 400,000 websites currently using it. This clearly shows that merchants using the older version of the platform have either:

• Invested so much that they can’t afford to migrate to Magento 2
• Or have found Magento 1 to perform within satisfactory levels

What’s more worrying though is that the Magento platform as a whole lacks greatly behind hosted ecommerce platform Shopify. Now this shouldn’t come as a surprise – Shopify is geared more towards smaller businesses while Magento users usually tend to be big organizations.

To give you an idea about how popular Magento (both 1.x.x and 2.x.x) is against its competitor, here’s an interesting graphic:

Interest in Shopify Plus – Magento 2’s direct competitor – has been unimpressive, at least according to this graphic that is. But interest in the Shopify platform as a whole is simply on another level.

Magento 2 Pricing

Magento 2 like its predecessor is an open-source ecommerce platform. As such, it is completely free to download and use – even with extensive modifications.

That’s if we’re talking about the Magento 2 Community Edition (CE), because there’s the Magento 2 Enterprise Edition which costs more around $22,000 / year. That’s certainly a lot of money for what’s basically a hosted version of an open-source software.

Yearly licensing fees for Magento 2 EE scale according to the customer’s gross sales revenue. As such, the more money your store makes, the more you pay for Magento 2 EE.

Gross Sales Revenue	Magento 2 Enterprise Edition Pricing ($ / year)
Up to $1 million	$22,000
$1 – $5 million	$32,000
$5 – $10 million	$49,000
$10 – $25 million	$75,000
$25 – $50 million	$125,000

 

However, there are important differences that aim to justify the Enterprise Edition’s expensive licensing fee:

• Enhanced site management
• Enhanced catalog management
• Dynamic marketing and management features
• Customer loyalty programs
• Dedicated 24/7 support

For a full list of the Enterprise Edition’s exclusive features, check out this list.

Magento 2 Support

Magento 2 differs from its predecessor in one crucial way: it comes with comprehensive support documentation. This has made the lives of countless developers much easier, who would have otherwise sought answers to their problems on forums, Reddit or Stack Exchange.

However, that’s about as much support you can expect from the official Magento 2 team. To talk to a real person and discuss your issues, you’ll either have to take help from an ecommerce development agency or hire a Magento 2 developer.

We recommend that you enlist the services of a full-service digital agency who will take care of every aspect of your ecommerce store – be it development, marketing or advertising.

Should You Make the Switch to Magento 2?

For merchants using Magento 1

Reaching a decision of whether to upgrade your Magento 1 ecommerce site to Magento 2 or not is certainly a difficult one. Magento 2 brings a whole raft of improvements but it’s not without its own challenges.

To come to a properly informed decision, it’s best to consult with a digital agency that specializes in ecommerce. It would be especially helpful if you talked to an agency that has already done Magento-1-to-Magento-2 migrations as they’re in a better position to enlighten you about the unique challenges this process presents.  

For merchants starting a new store

There are lots of great ecommerce platforms out there. If you’re looking to create a brand-new ecommerce store, it would be well worth your while going through reviews, features and the pros and cons of each of these platforms. Here at Logic Inbound, our default recommendation for small-to-medium businesses is to use Shopify.

If you want an enterprise-grade ecommerce platform which can be customized to the nth-degree, then Magento 2 certainly has a strong case. Here again, you might want to consult with an experienced ecommerce development agency as to whether the complexities of Magento 2 store development are worth the rewards. Remember, Shopify Plus and BigCommerce Enterprise are both strong alternatives here.

Closing Thoughts

Magento 2 is a powerful ecommerce platform that has been built from the ground up with just one purpose in mind: to be the best ecommerce platform there is. While it may not be able to compete with the likes of Shopify and WooCommerce when it comes to sheer popularity, its strong points including its modular design and robust architecture mean that it will always have its fair share of customers.

Compared to Magento 1, Magento 2 is hands-down the better ecommerce platform. It’s easier to use, has support for modern web technologies and comes with vastly improved support documentation. It’s a worthy successor and one that can certainly be used for full-blown enterprise ecommerce operations – provided you have the budget to afford it.

 

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