Signs You Need Custom Magento Development

When your eCommerce website reaches a certain growth point, you will naturally start looking at ways to improve the platform for your customers as well as you, the business owner. One of the most popular and effective ways of optimizing your Magento-based eCommerce business is by shifting from standard, entry-level templates to a fully customized solution.

Of course, this can be a significant investment, so the question that gets asked is, when is the right time to move to a custom solution? In this article, we answer that question and more.

What is Custom Magento Development?

As the name would suggest, custom Magento development is about taking the basic Magento code and making it into something uniquely tailored for your business. On the front-end, this usually results in a customer-friendly site that incorporates your branding and any customer-centric features that work to attract and convert visitors. Custom features might include integration with stock handling and logistics solutions, accounting packages, and direct marketing tools on the back-end. 

Promote Your Products

With customized plug-ins and extensions, you can ensure that your most profitable products are also your most popular products, including those you wish to push for a particular season or other reason. Your Magento developers will build tools that allow your customers to get interactive views of product 3D models to essentially make the whole experience much more engaging and fulfilling for those looking to buy. 

A secondary benefit of these particular features is a reduction in returns. The better you present your product, the more accurately the customer can select the item they want.

Stand Out from the Crowd

There has been unprecedented growth in eCommerce over the last couple of years, thanks in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic, with some estimates suggesting a 44% growth in 2020 alone for the United States. There are no signs of that growth slowing. 

Great news for your business, right? Unfortunately, suppliers and distributors have saturated the market with products, including many niche products. You need to take steps to stand out from the crowd. A custom Magento implementation can be what you need to incorporate your unique branding across your site(s) to ensure smooth, fast loading, and improved customer experience. 

Personalize the Experience

Personalizing the customer experience when they visit your site can be a game-changer for anyone involved in eCommerce, as this report indicates. When you move to a customized Magento platform, you will develop features that speak to the individual customer by making personalized recommendations based on previous activity and offering on-the-spot promotions or incentives. 

Maximum Uptime

Many things can slow down or even shut down your website, including viruses, unoptimized images, poorly written code, etc. If your website is struggling and has increasing downtime, you are losing customers. 

Studies have shown that if a website takes more than three seconds to load fully, more than half of visitors will close the page and go elsewhere. It is frustrating for both sides of the potential transaction and can damage your business. You are dependent on sales, and you can’t make a sale if potential customers don’t stay on your site. 

Using a custom Magento development can ensure that you minimize downtime and optimize your load times. You can do this through advanced caching, better image management, or a range of other tricks and tips; making these improvements become increasingly more crucial as your business grows.

Scale-up

When you become established in your sector, you will likely seek to grow the business through new sales channels, expanding your audience reach, and adding new products or services. These can all be built right into your custom Magento platform. You can do this by either integrating with your social media presence, improving your SEO and thus your search engine ranking position, or by simply allowing you to quickly and easily add and remove product listings, descriptions, and images. 

Go Mobile

The basic templates for Magento should all be relatively multi-device ready. Visitors using smartphones, tablets, and laptops/desktops, should all get an experience designed for those devices. Often those templates can be tweaked or customized to a degree, which is an attractive solution for the business owner as it saves the cost of a fully customized solution and still gives some agility.

However, as soon as you start to add features or plug-ins to the code of the basic template, you will likely come across some challenges in keeping those device-specific elements. This could be due to how the original template was coded or because the basic template has to sacrifice some responsiveness. Remember that your eCommerce platform needs to be built with customers in mind first and foremost; any changes you make should only ever improve the visitor experience, no matter what device they are using. 

SEO

The importance of search engine optimization cannot be overestimated, as any eCommerce business owner knows. Achieving the number one spot is the holy grail, of course. Anything on the first page of results is a significant step on the way to the top.

The algorithms that search engines use to rank sites are complicated and ever-evolving. You need to make sure that your website is optimized to meet the algorithms’ conditions.

 It is more than just packing your homepage with keywords (that can actually be counter-productive). It is about ensuring that the various SEO standards are met, including image tags, metadata, content, URLs, and many other elements on your pages. Using an experienced team of custom Magento developers will give you the assurance that your site is well-ranked and out-positions your competitors.

Need Help?

You can do no better than speaking with Digital Authority Partners for more information on custom Magento web development. Our Magento developers have many years of experience in successfully building, integrating, and optimizing Magento deployments for clients ranging from small enterprises to Fortune 500 companies and world-leading universities. Whatever your goals for your eCommerce site, we can help you achieve them quickly, creatively, and cost-effectively.