Launching a blog site for the Magento store is an effective yet hectic method for online merchants to grow their businesses. Amongst numerous concerns, a major headache is choosing a suitable blogging platform to integrate with Magento store. There are various options but the two most popular ones that were picked by world-leading eCommerce websites are WordPress integration and Magento blog extension. In this article, the fundamental benefits and downsides of these two will be discussed to provide you a comprehensive look and thus, help you make a well-informed decision.
Magento Blog Extension Vs. WordPress Integration – What are they?
Before getting straight to the Magento blog extension vs WordPress integration comparison, let’s take a brief look at the basic concepts as well as the forces that make these two popular among users.
At its core, a blog site is a frequently updated website that publishes new content to attract readers for some sort of purpose. Common purposes of launching a blog site for Magento store are promoting products and services; providing news, tips, reviews, or tutorials; or announcing sales and promo campaigns. Therefore, besides traditional blogging functionalities, they are usually incorporated with various e-commerce functionalities.
WordPress has been a blogging platform since day one. People, later on, realized its potential and started using it for business purposes. Magento went through a completely reverse process. It was intentionally created for e-commerce, with many dedicated features devoted exclusively to e-Commerce. However, with the development of blog extension, Magento stores can now have a content-oriented sub-site, making it a fierce competitor to WordPress in terms of content distribution and management.
Serving the same core purposes, Magento blog extension and WordPress share several similarities. They both are open-source, allowing you to create and organize content in the most simplified yet effective way possible to assist your business. They are also customizable and SEO friendly. Last but not least, both have their own strong online community where users and developers help each other by sharing their experiences.
What is the Right Blog Solution For Your Business?
However, a deeper examination will indicate the subtle differences between the two and help you to choose the right blogging platform for your businesses. Let’s go through each criterion:
1. Product types
To begin with, the choice can be made regarding the types of products your store sells. You probably want to create an eCommerce business, but to what size do you want to build it? And what products are you going to offer customers? Potential answers are:
- Physical products: On both Magento and WordPress and in different ways, this can be achieved. Actually, how many items you want to sell should be the issue. You probably should go with Magento if your response is over 1000.
- Digital products: Since digital goods do not require complicated processes like delivery, order tracking or monitoring, WordPress integration is a simple yet effective solution.
- Services: Since both platforms can be integrated smoothly with a shopping cart system, again, you can choose either of them. However, Magento has the upper hand because it accommodates this type in its product categories. WordPress, on the other hand, may require additional modules to examine customers’ demand. For example WordPress Event Manager (for arranging meetings), WordPress Contact Form (for complex questionnaires), etc. depending on the output you want.
2. Business size
All channels can deal with a small, simple store but if you aim to set up a blog for a multi-vendor marketplace, the platform really matters. Regarding its advantage of being devoted exclusively to eCommerce, Magento should be the answer in this case. This sort of store requires Magento’s complexity, robustness, and eCommerce-oriented nature. Many extensions are also built by Magento developers to help turn any stand-alone web store into fully engaged multi vendor marketplaces.
3. Posting density
This is one of the most decisive factors, so please think about the number of articles you plan to post on your blog now if you haven’t done so. If your writing productivity is high or you have a whole content team that can produce dozens of articles per week, you should go for the more content-oriented platform – WordPress. WordPress possesses some important tools for team-work like editing multiple drafts simultaneously, managing edit history as well as a ton of plugins to assist your team-work process. This platform has no match when it comes to flexibility.
Furthermore, WordPress’s built-in features set is much richer and more powerful. Creating posts, columns, categories, etc. is still feasible with the Magento blog extension’s basic set, but further functionalities are not always available. However, you can always add the functions you wish to the blog manually.
4. Installation
If you are not an experienced Magento developer, you should also consider how fast and simple it is to install a blog. Regarding the blog extension, as you already know, it is an additional module of Magento so it can be installed right away with just a few procedures. After successfully installed, the extension can also integrate with your Magento store’s current settings and template, which saves you a lot of time and effort and can not be achieved in an integration module like WordPress. With the Magento blog extension, you are using just one platform – Magento, instead of Magento and WordPress.
Turning to WordPress integration, different from the Magento blog extension, it is an independent platform and should be handled by experts for the sake of time and efficiency. You must also create a mutual database for your Magento store and WordPress by configuring the WordPress blog, then you are good to go.
5. Security
Lately, cybersecurity has become such an alarming issue that no online vendors can ignore. When you ask your customers to purchase goods online, it is your responsibility to give them a secure space. Even the least infringement may damage your credibility and have a long-term effect on your business.
Magento is one of the most secure platforms with virtually no safety flaws. And it is known that WordPress is not famous for its security even though it is one of the most popular CMS platforms. If you install unreliable WordPress plugins from third parties, your site becomes even more vulnerable to malware and security violations.
And that is it! I hope this article can make your decision a bit less hectic. However, keep in mind that every Magento store is unique. There is no perfect list that covers every criterion of comparison that your store needs. So please consult this list but extend it by adding your own criteria if needed. And regardless of the platform, you can only make the best out of a blog if you have clear goals and smart strategy.
