WooCommerce vs Magento ? - Premium Web Development Part 01

What is more reliable ? Who is more optimized ? Who provides more security ?

As someone who developed in past 20 months over 30 premium corporate websites in Asia and Australia, I've had first hand experience to in reality do so pros/cons between these 2 on a serious level.

1. Introduction to WooCommerce
   WooCommerce is additional plugin for WordPress CMS built and managed by WooThemes. As you all know, with 3 clicks, you can convert your blog to a fully functional, but yet limited, online shop. BUT... You know @ned :)

2. About the project and initial build

Last year i was a sub-contractor for a development company from Bangkok, who had one really huge corporate client who is from a Thai market knows as most popular Thai Fashion Brand. They requested shop with over 300 products, conditional logic, coupons, mailing lists, automatization, optimization, etc.

• Company started building it under WordPress CMS as foundation of the website. Template was lightweight, it had Visual Composer as GUI builder for pages and content, it was responsive and as soon as we started nurturing it per clients request, we got something that was serious problem.

• To complete all the tasks that clients requested, in wordpress you can't do that with just a WordPress, Compatible Template and WooCommerce... We had to add on top of WordPress, template and following plugins, not just WooCommerce, but also additional plugins for WooCommerce, so here are some of them:

Search by SKU
WooCommerce Advance Shipping (different rules per package weight, location, delivery type)
WooCommerce CartPRO
YITH WooCommerce Waiting List Premium
WooCommerce Extra Product Options
Composite Products
Bundled Products
Kasikorn Payment Plugin
Popup Survey
RewardSystem

So we ended up with WordPress installation that is having 27 plugins in template, core, include and template to run.

Solo VPS... Not enough.

1. Client delivery

When client got their website online, they were not happy. They paid for premium web development over $12k, and they faced a problem, serious problem as you can see below in the screenshot

Client got seriously pissed. 4 months of development and so much money lost, that they can't even login properly to WordPress even if traffic is low... Website was collapsing.

1. Issue with a website
   Top issue was... Loading so many plugins, started loading BUNCH of Java scripts and additional CSS that was completely spreading everywhere in the code. Top, bottom, middle... Website was loading horrible. Now, they wanted a "quick fix", which professionally was explained to main contractor that is simply impossible.

Stripping entire Java, reorganizing paths, load and optimizations HAD TO BE DONE MANUALLY!
There is no plugin in wordpress that will optimize your code and scripts especially when your wordpress is loading 27 ADDITIONAL PLUGINS!

1. Finding a solution
   Nothing, we didn't had enough time to build Magento, and we had to find seriously fast solution that will improve all this. So, there I was... sitting and thinking...

a) We implemented CDN network. Due to implementation of CDN network, we had to alter completely our customizations and loads in file where certain files were not being sent/synced to CDN.
b) I've had to replace Apache with Nginx + PHP 7 to compensate RAM usage and speed between process (httpd) and workers (nginx)
c) i had to place on top of everything REDIS cache.
d) We had to optimize the code.

It was done in 19 hours, without sleep with 3 Web/Hosting serious professionals.

1. Final Result

We still lost the client. Why ? Yeah, website became super fast, super interactive, but all that interactivity started creating crap between redis cache and current/live data. It was impossible to control so many loops and requests.

In the end, client changed the WordPress in 2017.

Final version they used for 1 year had a load of 13.1 sec, without Redis.

1. Conclusion

DO NOT USE WORDPRESS FOR HEAVY SOCIAL NETWORKS, PREMIUM E-COMMERCE, JOB BOARDS UNLESS YOU ARE SERIOUSLY CONFIDENT IN YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF LINUX HOSTING, CACHE, PHP, JAVA, WORDPRESS, CDN, OR you will just get fucked up in the end.

Magento experience is coming in Part 02