You have a good idea for a product or service. You research the target audience, and competitors and have a business plan. Now what? Yes, it’s time to develop your website! Many people choose Magento as an ideal platform for website development for its significant advantages. However, some may find the Magento website development process quite complicated to swallow. If you get stuck with this, too, don’t worry. This article will help you understand it in a much simpler way!
Contents
What Is A Magento Website?
Magento is a PHP-based framework distributed on March 31, 2008, to help programmers create e-commerce websites.
Additionally, up to this time, hundreds of thousands of businesses, including major brands like Nike and Samsung, have used this open-source to launch their online store.
Without Magento, site owners would find it considerably difficult to update their websites with new products, and categories, and add new pictures and descriptions.
What Are The Advantages Of Magento That Outweigh Other Platforms?
Out of many e-commerce platforms, Magento has always won the favor of users. Now let’s take a look at some of its benefits!
Magento is a free open source platform
Magento is largely considered the best SEO-friendly e-commerce platform on the market. Moreover, Magento is available in three different versions:
- Open Source Edition (for free)
- Commerce Edition (paid)
- Magento Go (paid & hosted on Magento’s servers)
The most popular of the three versions is the Community Edition. It is entirely open-source and has the largest and most active developer community for e-commerce systems on the internet.
Magento is a very professional platform and completely free. Therefore, you can create a “monumental” website using Magento with a basic understanding of English and technology.
Rich feature lists
Compared to other e-commerce platforms, Magento outperforms in terms of features category.
Apart from essential functions such as product, category, inventory management, client account, customer support, order administration, etc., Magento has some features that set it apart from other platforms:
- High customization
- Freedom to pick hosting providers
- Simple multi-platform integration: Magento enables any modification without restriction
- Fast-loading web page
Optimal scalability
Merchants often worry about a slow and underperforming website. However, Magento will handle it with ease with no need for extensive performance adjustment.
Additionally, it is not a problem with Magento whether you’re selling 100 or 1,000,000 SKUs. It can host 500k+ goods on a single server with sufficient RAM (32-64GB) and process thousands of transactions every hour.
Impressive SEO capabilities
When it comes to SEO, Magento features and benefits include:
- Metadata for home page, product, category pages, rich snippets, title tag prefixes, and suffixes
- Canonical tags and distinct category routes for product URLs to avoid duplicating content
- SEO-friendly redirects and URLs
- XML sitemaps and robots.txt
These Magento’s built-in SEO tools, when combined with SEO best practices, these Magento’s built-in SEO tools will be enough to boost your website’s exposure.
Mobile-friendliness
Today, the number of mobile phone users globally has surpassed six billion and will continue to rise in the coming years.
As a result, today’s consumers are mobile-first. Thus, if you can not develop a mobile-friendly website, you will lose a marketing game.
Magento provides all of the capabilities needed to create a mobile-friendly e-commerce site for iPhones, iPads, and Android smartphones.
Therefore, in an age when mobile users spend 90% of their time in apps rather than mobile browsers, Magento’s mobile-friendliness becomes a valuable asset.
Magento Website Development Process – How Does It Work?
Now, let’s dive into the main part of this blog post for the Magento website development process. Typically, there are 7 basic steps as below.
Step 1: Requirement analysis
For this first step, you need to list out your requirements for the website, including:
- Sitemap or site structure
Which pages are included in the sitemap? For example, the home page, category pages, product pages, shopping cart page, checkout page, CMS pages including information about, contact, FAQs, refund policy, cookies policy.
- Design
There are two options for web design, including using ready-made themes and creating a unique layout from scratch.
If you prefer to use a pre-built theme, you need to list out your requirement about customization.
When designing your website from scratch, consider your required website color, style, or the favorite site you want for your website.
- Function
Which default and custom functions of Magento that you want to use? It is necessary to describe how each feature works regarding custom functions.
- Extension
In addition to the above features, you can use more extensions to improve performance.
In that case, define which features should be added, then find the appropriate extension with any required customization.
- Payment
Which payment gateway party will the web use, and what payment methods does it provide? Does Magento support those payment gateways/methods?
If not, what is the method to integrate (by using an extension or developing a custom module)?
- Shipping
Which shipping carrier and method will the web use be supported by Magento? If not, what is the method to integrate (by using an extension or developing a custom module?)
- Language, currency
What languages and currencies does the site use? Which currency will be used for payment?
- Third-party integration
Do you need to integrate the site with any other party? (e.g., ERP, CRM, PIM…)
- Timeframe, milestone
What is the estimated time for the milestones of the project?
- Server
Will the site be developed on the developer’s server or the customer’s server?
Step 2: Web Design (Front-end Development)
- Using theme
If you want to use the theme without any customization, you need to provide the logo, banners, and colors for theme installation.
If you need simple customization, the developer can edit the design after installation.
Moreover, it helps to provide the wireframe & prototype of the complete design for complex customs. After that, the developers will design the web after being approved. The estimated time is about 1 to 4 weeks.
- Designing from scratch
Regarding this approach, the web designer will provide 1-3 designs of the website (wireframes/ prototypes) for you to choose from. After approval, the frontend developers will start working. The estimated average time is about 1-2 months.
Step 3: Backend Development
This part can be done in parallel with frontend development. Backend development includes:
- Enable default Magento 2 functionality
The functionalities are configured to work the way you require and boost site performance for better sales.
- Develop custom functions (if any)
In the case of custom functions, backend developers will build them. Remember that the more custom parts they need to create, the longer the development time will take.
- Install and customize Magento 2 extensions
You will work with the developer team to set out an extension list and find the exact ones. There are plenty of Magento 2 extensions that can help enhance your site’s performance.
- Integrate the site with selected payment gateway(s) and shipping carrier’s system
These two are essential for any e-store. Depending on your region and accepted currencies, developers can suggest suitable ones or customize one for your store.
- Configure site language, currency, store information, email templates, etc
During the backend building, developers will also complete the configuration for these features.
- Integrate third-party systems (if any)
Your business may require an ERP or CRM for better management. Do inform your development partner as soon as possible to work on it early.
- Import product data (categories, images, SKUs, descriptions, quantity, price,…)
After the main parts are created, all your data is imported into the database.
- Create CMS pages
CMS pages are essential to engage and persuade customers to check out and buy your products, so invest time in providing valuable information to them.
Step 4: Testing
There are two methods, including internal testing & user acceptance testing:
- Internal testing
The tester of the development team will test each phase of the project based on the project’s requirements and an available list of test cases of each company.
At the end of the project, a quality assurance manager will recheck the quality before giving it to you.
- User acceptance testing
You, the site owner, will directly participate in testing the final result. You need to give feedback, including errors found or improvement requests to the development team.
Step 5: Site Optimization
At this stage, the developer will fix the feedback, optimize speed, performance, and SEO if requested. Before releasing the site, the developer will send it to the site owner for approval.
Check everything once again. It’s never a waste of time to recheck all the essential pages and functions.
Step 6: Deployment & Launch
After the development process stage, the code will be deployed or moved from the development site to the live site on the live server. The site will be connected with the site domain.
Finally, promotion campaigns are set up to attract customers to the new site or other marketing plans.
Step 7: Website maintenance and support
At the releasing stage (about 1 to 3 months) of developing a Magento website, you still need to keep in touch with the developer to get support when the website has problems or help operate the web.
It helps to work with an agency which offers free support during the first few months after launching.
Which Company Provides The Best Magento Website Development Process?
And by now, you should have a good sense of the method needed to follow. Setting up an e-commerce website, on the other hand, is a difficult task, especially when using Magento technology.
As a result, selecting the right partner to assist you with Magento development is critical if you want to build your business faster. Tigren is the best solution among e-commerce development businesses.
With 10 years of experience in Magento development, Tigren is a prominent Magento website development company.
If you plan to develop a Magento website, contact us at [email protected] to get support.
Wrapping Up
In final words, the Magento website development process is complicated to understand. To some extent, this blog post can help you have a clear idea of developing a website based on the Magento platform step by step.
However, your online business still needs a software partner to go along with not only to help you in website development but also to support you in operating your whole business.
Related Posts:
