SEO

Should I move to shopify from Magento?

The platform battle of Magento vs Shopify rages on. Increasingly merchants are moving to Shopify from Magento due to easy of operations and website management.

For many, where the decision was a no-brainer, the move has already been done.
For others, this question rages on, as shopfiy adds more features from itself and its partners in an easy to manage.

This article is written in 2022 for the “others”.

The “others” I refer to have some of these characteristics

  • A working eCommerce business – one that makes money, increasing the risk of a move
  • Migrated to Magento 2 and hence have invested in the technology
  • Customizations that differentiate the store and would be difficult to achieve in Shopify. These may include custom attributes, use of custom options, personalization technology, etc.
  • Headless frontend
  • Worried about data ownership

What are the pain points in Magento that makes merchants look at shopify

  • Managing the Agency or Magento Agencies are expensive!
  • Website speed scores or Magento website speed scores can be bad.
  • Everything is so hard in Magento compared to Shopify

What options you have to ease the pain and stay on Magento?

  • Managing the Agency.In my conversation with merchants unhappy with Magento, the main reason to consider a move is the performance of the Agency – i.e. they have an agency problem, not a platform problem.
    • Agencies have powerful marketing presentations that appeal to the heart of an eCommerce merchant. But, a merchant should pay attention to the compatibility between of the agency to how the business operates before choosing one. Infact, it may be even desirable to manage multiple agency relationships.Some factors to consider.
    • If you have an in-house project manager, you need developers – an strong in development. One of our customers has 2 agencies – a cheaper local and a more established one. Depending on the complexity of the project, they decide which agency will be best. They have their own project manager.
    • Some agencies have a delivery manager that acts as a single point of contact. They work with you on your requirement, discuss with the developers and are responsible for the delivery. Ensure they communicate with all teams – including business and SEO.Some agencies offer a full eCommerce service – including SEO to development. These are very suitable for growing eCommerce arm of a omni channel merchant. Such agencies can work on outcome basis – with a profit share for example.
    • A point of conflict between merchants and agencies is the business model – Agencies like an hourly billing model as it closely matches their biggest cost – the manpower used to execute the project. Many merchants may think of a fixed cost model best suits them – with outcomes well defined. Software on the other hand is very difficult to estimate, especially in an agile development world. Merchants wanting a fixed cost model should be more acceptable to cost escalations due to change requests.
    • Use an expert to interface with an agency. If you have a complex project and do not have an inhouse eCommerce manager, it will be a good idea to hire an consultant to interface with the agency. The consultant can act as a project manager communicating the business needs to developers and ensuring the delivery meets the quality goals.
  • The user interface. From a competitive perspective, UI is the most crucial part that can help you differentiate from your competitors. A more personalized website or an emersive experience will attract more visitors to stay and purchase.But, magento websites are slow on page speed scores, especially those developed on the original Magento 2 theming, which is archaic by todays UI technology standards.The Magento UI stack is evolving. Apart from the many headless options, Hyvä Themes has completely rewritten the theme to be fast and modern.Infact, in my opinion, UI should be the main reason to stay on Magento – the ability to give the best user experience. Rather than have a single page speed goal for the website, have a more user experience view. Even google suggests to have targets for faster website and work towards achieving them.
  • Ease of Shopify vs Magento. A big complaint against Magento is its bloat – too many features, not many, easy to use. A customer recently made this comment when they were trying to enable the watermark in Magento. Turns out, while the watermark feature is shown in Magento’s admin dashboard, enabling it will immediately remove all images – until the developer had accounted for this in their development. The feature bloat meant the developer did not really understand why it would not work. While this feature just works out of the box in shopify.

Magento has a community

Magento has over the years grown to have a very vibrant community. Some estimates put it at over 300,000 strong. Mainly tech professionals, it also consists of many areas of eCommerce business.

For some merchants, it is important to know they (or their online business) is not beholden to a single corporation. A Shopify network for example, though very cohesive, is orchestrated by Shopify. Shopfiy does whet these vendors, but there is no assurance of quality given by Shopify on their behalf. Moreover, Shopfiy can decide to compete with one of the features with any partner in that network, making your favourite plugin obsolete.

Magento on the other hand has independent plugin developers, some of who have made a name for themselves. The agency and merchant have the task of ensuring every plugin they use is good in terms of quality and functionality.

Migration to shopify may not be all roses

On the other hand, shopify’s ease of administration can get in the way of large changes. A process has to be used including using staging site for UAT, git and tools like ThemeKit, Beanstalk and/or the shopify github app. Which brings back the agency and project management question.

Getting feature parity with a Magento website may also not be easy. One merchant moved to Shopify and lost some upsell opportunities as they had used custom options in Magento. They commissioned some custom development and realised that the agency would launch a server and store some data there. This added to a vendor lockin (their agency) they did not want.

luroConnect easing the pain of Magento and Headless/PWA

luroConnect is a managed hosting platform for eCommerce – including Magento and Headless eCommerce.

We believe in serving 2 stake holders in an eCommerce website – the developer / agency and the merchant. We have tools and features to help both. To remove the pain of taking developer code to production. luroConnect supports dev, staging and production environments, with an inbuilt CI/CD for all platforms we support, with low downtime deploys.

The luroConnect stack deploys on the cloud of customers’ choice. The production site is backed by a performance dashboard, configurable alerts and 24×7 support.

Our extensive agency network helps us match a merchant to an agency.

Considering moving from Magento to Shopify? Talk to us. We may just give you a reason to stay back!

We can analyze your site for free

Schedule a call

Not happy with your website performance and want an expert to look at it?

  • We will analyze your site using public information.
  • We will ask you to give us a 1 day web server log file.
  • We will try to identify what steps if any you should take to improve your sites performance goals.
Click here to schedule the call
September 24, 2022 By Magento, PWA, SEO, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

What should (and should not be) in a robots.txt file?

What is robots.txt?

robots.txt is a file, accesible as a URL https://<domain>/robots.txt that tells crawlers and BOTs what URLS crawlers can access on the domain / website.

However, there is a lot of confusion among internet marketers on its value and power.

The format of the file is very simple. Instructions to allow or disallow paths per user agent are grouped together. The user agent itself is a shortened version of the user agent header and each BOT publishes its own shortcode. Google for exanple has a top level Googlebot but has many others for images, ads, etc.

In addition a global setting in robots.txt is sitemap. This directive tells all crawlers where the sitemap file is. Most commonly it is an xml file.

Each crawlers is free to interpret the robot.txt, including if it should honor the directives.

Do you use Disallow in robots.txt

SEO experts and internet marketers would like to think that by adding a Disallow of an existing URL will cause google to not index the page.

That is not true – google states this in many documentations. At one place it puts up a warning

“Warning: Don’t use a robots.txt file as a means to hide your web pages from Google search results.

If other pages point to your page with descriptive text, Google could still index the URL without visiting the page. If you want to block your page from search results, use another method such as password protection or noindex.”

We actually see internet marketers in the Magento space browse the internet and get a suggested robots.txt with perhaps the longest content they can find, thinking the more Disallows they have the better google will crawl.

Security Issues with bad disallows

We see commented sections saying “#Directories”.

Little do they know they are exposing the internal directory structure of the application with this. And since robots.txt is available to everyone including bad actors, you have just created a security issue.

We also see some marketers give a huge list of crawlers they don’t want on their website. This is completely unnecessary. Tell your hosting provider. If you are with luroConnect, all our plans include “BOT Blockers”. Just let us know and we will match a real HTTP User Agent header and block it.

What would be the best way to structure a robots.txt?

There is no significance of allow!

User-Agent : *
Disallow : /<path visible to user you don’t want crawler to go like product compare>
User-Agent : bingbot
Crawl-delay : 1
Sitemap : <sitemapurl>

Note though Google suggests using noindex on the pages you put in disallow.

Another interesting fact is google documents that it caches robots.txt for 24 hours. Essentially meaning that cache control headers are ignored by google. However, a browser does cache robots.txt, so when checking the current robots.txt of a website that google will see, please disable your browser cache.

So, why a note on robots.txt on a managed hosting blog?

We are a hosting platform that understands the importance of SEO and have acted on it.
We know and keep track of robots.txt, sitemaps and feeds for all our customers.

We also feature a very strong BOT Blocker – regular expression match any user agent string, identify googlebot imposters and block them, basic authentication password protected staging and dev sites to ensure they don’t get crawled.

If you are SEO knowledgeable and do not find the recommendation acceptable, we encourage you put your comments in this blog. We will acknowledge and publish all updates we accept.

January 25, 2022 By Security, SEO, Technical SEO 0 Comments Read more...

404 when moving to Magento 2

When migrating platforms for example from WooCommerce to Magento or from Magento 1 to Magento 2, it is imperative that we move all URLs  to ensure proper SEO authority is retained after the move as well as real users get a smooth Customer Experience (CX).

If it is not possible to maintain the same URLs, ensure redirects are made. This is especially true of a move from WooCommerce and also true when as part of the move the store is reorganized. When migrating data, an automated custom URL redirect process is recommended.

In spite of the best planning and intentions it is likely some URLs may be missed and redirects may not be setup.

Failing to do so has 2 negative effects

  • BOTS, especially Google may visit the new site with the older URL and receive a 404. This can reduce your site rating on Google.
  • Users that may have bookmarked or use browser history may get a 404 and get a bad CX resulting in visitors bouncing and reducing brand value.

Google Analytics does not show 404s. Google search console may show if the count is high. Neither of these is a reliable source to know what was missed.

Only the server knows for sure it severed a 404 and would have logged it in the apache or nginx access and/or error log files. On a new migration we recommend automating a 404 report from the log file, atleast once a day.

If using our luroConnect / Edge product, the dashboard can be used to setup a real-time alert for any 404 returned. This can then be actioned by developers or the agency to include a redirect.

Watch our webinar on performance and scaling in Magento

Its free!

Using analogy to vehicular traffic we explain performance and scaling in Magento.
Key takeaways

  • Know how to compare hosting options
  • Importance of good code
  • How to scale
  • Tuning Magento
Click here to schedule the call

We can analyze your site for free

Schedule a call

Not happy with your website performance and want an expert to look at it?

  • We will analyze your site using public information.
  • We will ask you to give us a 1 day web server log file.
  • We will try to identify what steps if any you should take to improve your sites performance goals.
Click here to schedule the call
February 28, 2019 By apache, Magento, Nginx, SEO, Technical SEO 0 Comments Read more...