Just over a yr in the past, I moved my website from Magento to WooCommerce. I described my strategy of evaluating and, finally, choosing WooCommerce in a H-half collection right here on Practical Ecommerce. Now, on this publish, a yr after making the change, I have come again to report my expertise.
First and foremost, I haven’t any regrets in shifting to WooCommerce. Although it has considerably fewer options than Magento, it’s nonetheless a lot better for my enterprise. Those final two phrases — “my enterprise” — are an essential caveat. WooCommerce isn’t for everybody, identical to Magento isn’t for everybody. WooCommerce is best fitted to smaller companies with an inexpensive vary of inventory — not bigger companies with tens of hundreds of strains.
WordPress and WooCommerce have greater than lived as much as their popularity for ease of use. It is straightforward to maintain them updated. This is in contrast to Magento, when upgrading made me nervous that the location would break and wish skilled assist. With WooCommerce, the improve is actually the press of a button. To date, upgrading WooCommerce has been error free — nothing has gone improper.
Instead of 1 giant multi-retailer Magento website, I run a number of discrete WooCommerce websites. My annual internet hosting invoice is what I used to pay month-to-month with Magento. Yet my websites are all considerably quicker now than with the Magento website. (I ran model M.H of Magento, not P.zero, which is meant to be simpler on assets.) Nevertheless, the mixture of WordPress and WooCommerce is less expensive to run than Magento.
The system upkeep is considerably simpler, too. Whilst for Magento any improve was a serious train, with WooCommerce it’s easy. Since WooCommerce doesn’t have the complicated layered navigation and tremendous-menu options, I cut up my inventory into discrete genres and have a website for every. This ought to have made system upkeep extra time consuming. Instead, I spend subsequent-to-no time on system upkeep. It is not a problem.
Keeping the inventory updated can also be a lot easier. I haven’t missed the overly complicated “Add Product” course of with Magento. Adding merchandise shortly on WooCommerce signifies that I can spend extra time getting the pictures proper, which is important for my excessive-worth gadgets.
Having orders unfold throughout a number of websites would seemingly be annoying. But I use an order administration system — Linnworks — that processes all orders centrally and automates the WooCommerce processing. I wouldn’t have to log into every website to cope with every order.
Regarding plugins, after sixteen months I understand some are important and others I don’t use as a lot as I had initially deliberate.
For instance, the Yoast web optimization plugin is important. It continues to immediate me, so as to add and develop my on-website search engine marketing. I don’t spend almost as a lot time on web optimization as I ought to; the Yoast extension graphically exhibits this to me.
The Jetpack plugin, nevertheless, which I thought can be useful, with quite a few options that I thought I would use, I don’t use it in any respect. The function of publishing to Facebook is ok, however I discovered myself stopping its default motion and ready till I had added a variety of merchandise earlier than posting manually a single abstract to Facebook. The different options I simply by no means acquired round to utilizing.
Other plugins, just like the grid-record toggle and the factors and reward methods, I haven’t used. There is nothing fallacious with them. I simply don’t want them. The import plugin, while I nonetheless extremely advocate, isn’t actually vital as soon as I went reside.
In reality, I have both eliminated or disabled over half of the plugins I initially put in.
In the meantime, WordPress and WooCommerce have continued to develop and enhance their platforms. The final main WooCommerce launch included an Ajax cart and checkout, which makes the cart and checkout course of extra skilled.
In the final yr, WordPress and WooCommerce have had many upgrades and releases. My plugins have had much less frequent releases and my themes solely occasional releases. But all releases put in inside seconds, no drawback.
Keeping WordPress and WooCommerce updated is so easy I would think about persevering with doing it over the Christmas gross sales interval. I would by no means do this with Magento.
In brief, the transfer to WooCommerce has been profitable. I would by no means contemplate returning to Magento.
