This Magento Content Management System (CMS) review covers everything you need to know about the platform. We rate it based on the basic things you will need to succeed regardless of if you are first starting out or are an established brand.
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History of the Magento Content Management System
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It employs the MySQL/MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It follows the conventions of object-oriented programming and architecture of model–view–controller. Moreover, Magento also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data. It was founded by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner in 2007. Magento released its first public beta version on August 31, 2007. Within four years, Magento caught the eye of big name players in eCommerce. “eBay made an investment in Magento in 2010, worth a 49% ownership share of the company.” Eventually Magento was spun out as an independent company by the new owner Permira Private Equity Fund on November 3, 2015.
Did you know?
“1 out of 4 businesses choose Magento as their e-commerce platform.”
Magento has 3 versions
- Magento Community Edition (free)
- Magento Enterprise Edition (paid)
- Magento Go (paid & hosted on Magento’s servers)
Here are 10 top sites that use Magento:
Magento CMS Ratings
Now let’s take a look at a few things that you should consider before choosing Magento
1.SEO
Much like WordPress, Magento is a highly SEO-friendly CMS. It comes along with various SEO features such as search engine friendly URLs, layered navigations, sitemaps, URL rewrites, and meta tags etc.
2.User Friendly
Magento is user-friendly. Magento’s admin and daily operations are fairly simple, but the actual set-up and customization process is complex. Magento sites have one of the best navigations around. The simple and clear platform allow you to display products on product pages easily. It also makes it easier for the customers to search for the products they are looking for. The other features that make Magento user-friendly are zoom-in ability, multiple pictures of the products and product reviews.
3.Cost
Magento Community Edition version is absolutely free to download and install but you may need to pay for web hosting, add-ons, an SSL certificate and payment processing. Moreover, the source code can be tweaked as required by the development of the website. You can also avail free troubleshooting that is available through user forums and large developer community of Magento. Magento is not simple, you are going to need a developer.
You can try an enterprise solution as an alternate, but they’re quite expensive. Magento Enterprise Edition begins at $22,000 to $32,000 per year.
4.Security
Magento was the ecommerce target of choice for hackers. Most of the systems that got affected in the past were not fully up to date with security patches. You can keep your Magento store security foolproof by taking these additional steps.
- Use the latest Magento version
- Download the patch according to your Magento version
- Two-factor authentication
- Acquire encrypted connection (SSL/HTTPS)
- Set a custom path for the admin panel
- Disable directory indexing
- Use Secure FTP
- Deploy an SQL injection firewall
- Use trusted Magento extensions
5.Up to Date
Magento keeps updating itself to maintain the security of its software and is also optimized to work with thousands of products, tons of traffic, and a big number of sales.
Overall Magento CMS Recommendation
Unlike Joomla or Drupal, Magento platform is intended for e-commerce. It offers everything that an e-commerce site requires to showcase products, offer customer service, carry out online transactions, and to run backend processes efficiently. Moreover, Magento is not a plug and play e-commerce platform. It does need some level of coding knowledge to make minor changes in the site.
