Challenges in Magento Development and How to Overcome Them
For an online business to thrive amidst the competition, it is important for them to be technically sound. And the base of the technical infrastructure of any ecommerce business is the platform they are based on. If you count the number of these platforms on which most of the stores are built up, Magento happens to be the one that dominates most of them. In spite of being one of most well established ecommerce platforms, you are still bound to face some challenges during Magento development. In this blog, we will discuss some of the common hurdles you might come across during custom Magento development and how you can overcome them.
Difficulty in operating
In spite of being one of the most preferred ecommerce platforms, Magento users still face some operational difficulties while working on it. Though they aren’t critical and a little knowledge about it can resolve the problem. Magento uses more RAM space than others as it is based on PHP coding and developers requires to keep this in mind while working on the platform. Difficulty in operating on the very platform your ecommerce business is based on, can can escalate into a big problem in the long run.
You can overcome this hurdle by opting for a customized theme for ecommerce development. It will surely lead to enhanced user experience. You can also go for various ways to increase your site’s performance.
Migrating to newer version
If your business is already doing well online, it can be a little cumbersome for you to move to the upgraded version of Magento. But it is crucial as well, keeping in mind the security and of your site and much more advanced technology at offer. Moving to Magento 2 can result in breakdown and data loss.
To make the process smooth and glitch-free, you need to plan it properly with the help of your IT partner. You should carefully study what differences the new version is going to make to your website so that you know well what you are opting for. You should also setup a sandbox to test your upgrade before going live!
Basic Sales Report Feature
The sales report feature in Magento is very basic. While adding products to your Magento site, it offers you to add size and country of origin for the products that doesn’t match the default form of adding information. This information though reflects in the front end, you cannot see these sales by attributes on the back end. For example, if you are selling blazers and require making a report on how much sales you were able to generate from a particular size of the product, you can’t do that.
Until Magento comes out with a solution on this, you can custom build the feature or it can be provided by a third party extension.
Slow Speed
Most of the users complain Magento to be slow to work on. It’s true to some extent as well. Since Magento was built as an extremely extensible system, most of the features were isolated to facilitate improvements in future. This increases the number of files and results in slow speed. So it’s basically the huge number of features that makes Magento slow, the very thing that makes it the best.
It’s not actually a big problem if your system is being handled by a knowledgeable person and if you are following the different ways of speeding up Magento. Opting for a good and specialized host for your store can help you overcome this hurdle easily as they know how and why of every Magento feature and have a solution for every possible server challenge which you might face.
Lack of Documentation
The actual problem isn’t that there are potholes in the documentations but that Magento has hardly worked on any documentation of the codes at all! The manual available is also not very helpful.
To administer and control your Magento site, you need to train your staff well. If you are not keen on organizing a person to person seminar, go for a webinar which is increasing in popularity day by day. Magento system has unique terminologies and peculiarities that your staff might not know. To develop your Magento site well, you need to hire a Magento developer or firm who has expertise on Magento development.
Fussy Upgrades
Though Magento is regular with updates, it doesn’t follow a planned path for the same. There is a lack of well thought out process and documentation in Magento updates which turns out to be a big shortcoming. It ultimately leads to more breakdowns when systems try to update their Magento to latest versions. Though many times it is faulty on the part of the website developer who doesn’t follow Magento development best practices but all other times Magento itself is to be blamed.
There is no hard and fast rule to get this rectified other than being careful from the very beginning. Your site should be built by following all the best practices. Also, whenever you are upgrading, opt for a separate development environment with the help of Magento experts. Since there is much probability of something going wrong, you will require fixing it before going live.
Magento has much to offer in spite of being an open source platform. But there is nothing we can call perfect yet when it comes to the web. The entire platform is in its developing phase. Magento has come a long way since it was first launched and we can definitely predict better things in the future too. So, for now, you can do with the non default solutions to all challenges that you might face while developing your Magento site.
