WooCommerce vs Magento ? - Premium Web Development Part 01 - rev. 2 @chainbb
WooCommerce Pros/Cons in details
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.
This is not just article, it's based on experience with a client and complete overall on project,
Short 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 :)
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.
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 invested, orders missed, clients lost... and they can't even login properly to WordPress even if traffic is low... Website was collapsing.
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!
Finding solution for a client
Nothing, we didn't had enough time to rebuild all under 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.
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 replaced WordPress in 2017.
Final version they used for 1 year had a load of 13.1 sec, without Redis, but with serious code lightweight championship where we had final knockout and it was not enough to hold WordPress as a winner.
Conclusion
Private conclusion: Stay the fuck away from WordPress and WooCommerce when you are having serious clients. For representative websites, corporate front-end's, blog's, simple shop... YEAH! For anything else... Been there, done that, no thanks.
Professional warning: 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.
(: SteemNOT style flaming :)
I hope this post will reach more people through @chainbb than it did few days ago in fucking @steemit
@steemit is becoming overpopulated network where due to high intensity of scammers for our newcomers post can't be even properly seen. It's down the drain within 1 minute.
Many thanks for reading.
Magento is coming in Part 02.
I have been working on magneto sites for about 10 years now, I totally agree with this post, I would never switch to wp, we have way too many skus and customizations.
@johnthompson - welcome aboard and happy to see you here! Thanks for notice, since this is older post and people usually are not making comments around posts like this. :)
You've got yourself new follower, and very soon i'm throwing out article about Magento experience and some nasty (not available on the market) custom modules in Magento 1.9 regarding OneStep Checkout (you can pick dates on postponed delivery as a customer, having calculated logistic costs and added on a price, regardless of category and custom price on each SKU) :)))) Along with Amasty :)
Cheers
Lucifer
Great read. We have been running Magento Community for 4 years now (after switching from Wordpress -> BigCommerce) and it has its own gigantic set of problems as well.
I would be interested to see a Shopify vs Magento follow-up article to hear your pro's/cons. If I could go back in time, I'd probably go with Shopify. But I'm wayyy too far down the rabbit hole now lol.
@bojanson thanks for reading and this great comment, if nothing, at least you gave sense to my experience and this all community which should have by default.
Regarding WordPress, unfortunately, Asia is so undeveloped and especially SE Asia - Thailand... For client even WordPress is to hard to use and they need months to learn to manage. Magento - Disaster regarding ease of use towards client. Although i have very good client that i will present in Part 02 for Magento. There are issues with Magento, especially if we are talking about 2.x version, but since i've been writing custom extensions in Magento and modules for past few years, i've been really deep down the rabbit hole. Magento is great experience for wholesale, commercial chains, a lot of articles/products/shops/languages... You have to be first HOSTING/Linux GURU to get Magento showing it's full power (security, speed, optimizations) then PHP/Web Master.
So even for developers, yeah Shopify comes as click&deploy safe solution. But how Shopify will behave when has inside his 1.7GB database/file over 20000 orders on annual basis and over 3000 articles in 50 different categories, with conditional logic on package weight, type, frost or not, where it's being delivered, checkpoints along the way, etc... Magento is on that side of discussion Sex Domination Master :)
Thanks for keeping up, hope you will read Part 02 Magento next week.