As digital transformation has forever changed the world of business, more and more companies are interested in IT outsourcing. In fact, the global staffing industry, one of the primary suppliers of staff augmentation talent, is estimated to support $490 billion in annual spending.
While this trend is growing fast, there is still some uncertainty regarding the healthiest and most convenient way for a business to use outside personnel. This article discusses two of the most popular contingent working models—staff augmentation and managed services—and how to choose the best option for your business needs.
What is staff augmentation, and how can it help you?
Staff augmentation allows companies to expand their in-house team with additional skilled resources to join a particular project. This type of outsourcing model chases once the project is over, and it's suitable for companies that don't need to hire someone permanently.
Staff augmentation is best used for short-term projects and can also be used as a "trial run" for potential full-time employees.
With this type of outsourcing, organizations can leverage specific skills on a per-project basis without going through costly and time-consuming hiring processes.
What is managed services, and how can it help you?
Unlike the staff augmentation model, which enables companies to expand their team with additional skilled professionals, managed services outsourcing practices imply hiring a fully-equipped team of professionals to take care of your specific project.
With the managed services model, you save many resources—time, costs, and effort—as you hire an entire team of skilled professionals who have the right tools and tech to complete your project.
While a service provider will handle your project on its entire length, from beginning to end, your job is to ensure that you select a reliable company that you can trust will deliver positive business outcomes.
The managed services model is the best fit for companies looking for stable and reliable long-term business cooperation.
Which one should you choose?
To help you figure out which one of these outsourcing models is the one you should choose for your organization, let's have a look at the pros and cons of staff augmentation and managed services.
Pros of staff augmentation:
- Project control and lower risk. Staff augmentation allows you to gain project autonomy and create outcomes based on specific requirements. You have the power to monitor the project on its entire length and have complete control over the development process, thus reducing the risk of ending up with the wrong project outcomes.
- Flexibility and easy scaling. By choosing staff augmentation services, you gain the flexibility to quickly access missing skills cover staff shortages. You also get to scale your staff according to your current demands without worrying about lengthy hiring processes.
- Reduced costs. Contingent working models like staff augmentation provide you the opportunity to work remotely with worldwide outsourced professionals. This allows you to cut the additional costs of office space, hardware and software expenses, as well as get rid of monthly employee taxes.
Cons of staff augmentation:
- Not suitable for long-term projects. Staff augmentation is practical only as long as you look for short-term business engagements as projects come and go.
- Increased dependence on third-party talent organizations. This can put your sustainability plans more at risk.
- Lengthy staff integration. New professionals that join specific, complex projects may require some time to get familiar with your products and expectations.
Pros of managed services:
- Gain more resources for other projects. Since an entire outsourced team will handle your specific project, you can step back and let them do the whole job. In this way, you'll have more time and energy to focus on other important tasks within your organization.
- Organized project and predictable outcomes. A managed services organization assesses the risks and predicts the results by developing a suitable structure for your project.
- Less time spent on managing IT. If you lack technical expertise and management resources, hiring a managed services company will help you save time and money at the end of the day.
Cons of managed services:
- Hard to ensure security. When opting for the services of a provider, you provide access to sensitive data and assets. Therefore, companies that require high levels of data and information security might want to think twice before choose a managed services outsourcing model.
- Higher costs. Although hiring a managed services company might be cost-effective in the long run, it's not always possible to get the complete services package at a low price. The costs of handing over your project to an IT firm might be higher than when opting for staff augmentation since managed IT services cover both IT functions and project management.
- Less control and autonomy. If you are looking to internalize your project management process and supervise outsourced staff, a managed services model might not be the suitable option for you.
Wrapping up
Although outsourcing is becoming more popular, finding an external reliable development team can be a struggle. There is a plethora of options available on the market, making it challenging to make a choice. A wise choice.
At Optasy, we understand how important it is to have a dedicated team of professionals that can handle a wide range of projects. So have a look at your services and contact us to learn more about how we can collaborate for success.
Image credit: Annie Spratt on Unsplash.
Raluca Olariu / May 19'2021
Websites and web applications are becoming increasingly complex, providing rich and interactive experiences. However, despite these emerging changes, the success of a website still relies on how the visitors perceive it. Is the website accessible and easy to use? Does it provide any value for me? Is it fun to navigate?
Your users' interaction with your website comes with these questions in mind, which build the foundation of their long-term decision to become regular customers.
What Does User Experience (UX) Mean?
UX is how a digital user feels when interacting with a website, web app, or software. Today, human-computer interaction should be accessible, efficient, provide value and utility for the user.
User experience design is a discipline that aims at meeting all these needs of the modern digital consumer by offering seamless web experiences.
Why Is UX Important?
User-centric business models are increasingly popular nowadays compared to how digital design was approached prior to the codification of user-centered design. Websites were built, and design decisions were made based on the preferences of the client and the designers' creative ideas.
The focus was on the brand and how the website looked, without considering what the users might feel when they would interact with the site.
However, as the Web is transforming at a fast pace—59.5 of the global population uses the internet today—and websites are becoming increasingly feature-rich, user experience designs are a must.
The design industry understands the need for optimization as users are interacting with web applications through multiple devices (mobile phones, tablets). Also, businesses also recognize accessibility as an essential requirement for modern digital users.
Key Steps for Creating Top-Notch User Experience Designs
1. Evaluate your current system to learn about your website's current state, existing issues, and possible improvements.
2. Use A/B testing to compare and decide upon the effectiveness and reliability of different user interfaces.
3. Hold user surveys to find out what existing, and potential users of the system think about its design. Remember, the user experience is a subjective one, so what better way to collect insights about it than by interviewing the users?
4. Build user flows to outline how visitors move through your website. This enhances the ease of movement through your platform by ensuring that your users don't waste time looking at what to do next.
5. Develop wireframes and high-fidelity prototypes to convey the overall direction of the user interface.
6. Create design patterns to provide consistency and find the right user interface elements, like module tabs or slideshows, for specific tasks. By doing so, you'll be able to build improved, more familiar user experiences.
7. Do a content inventory so that you can enhance the user experience by changing your information architecture.
8. Get to know your audience, as this is an essential step for creating user-friendly website designs. Create user profiles and personas that support you in delivering experiences that reflect the needs and voice of your audience.
9. Create content style guides that provide UX designers and writers with the correct input for building consistent brand and design elements.
How do you know your project needs UX design?
Identifying the areas where UX design would be of most benefit is important. While all Web systems could benefit from a design of the user experience, resources are not unlimited, and things need to be prioritized in the complex world of web development.
Complex systems with complicated architectures like multi-faceted websites, interaction-rich apps, or e-commerce sites can benefit a lot from UX design.
The same goes for start-ups and small companies, which can opt for training existing employees in the art of UX design to save some extra costs. However, creating solid user experiences in the first version of a product can generate more organic traffic and attract more visitors. But start-ups might not have enough resources for recruiting a highly-skilled UX designer.
UX design is also a good choice for projects with longer timeframes. Although UX design is not one size fits all, the concept can benefit long-term website projects by potentially saving time and costs.
Are you in doubt whether or not you need UX design or not? Don't worry, Optasy has your back. Contact us, and we'll do the hard work for you—analyze your website and offer advice and support on your UX design capabilities and opportunities. So let’s have a chat!
Photo credit: UX Indonesia on Unsplash.
Raluca Olariu / May 12'2021
Traditional Drupal websites use Drupal as the end-to-end solution for creating, storing, and displaying content to the end-user. Modern approaches leverage headless Drupal, where building and storing happen on Drupal, but displaying is not.
Headless Drupal approaches make Drupal the backend content repository and build the frontend in different technologies that communicate with Drupal through an API.
Why is the headless approach an effective one?
Today, many companies opt for using headless Drupal solutions, and the reasons are not few. If you don't want to sacrifice the user experience but still enjoy the powerful tools provided by Drupal, a headless approach might be the best fit.
Decoupled Drupal is known for its several benefits such as:
More channels to display content on
In the hectic digital landscape, your marketing team knows that communicating with your customers on multiple channels is critical. The way companies use content management systems today has to do with their need to push content on various channels, thus increasing their digital presence.
If used properly, headless Drupal can be a source of content for various consumers. It provides content on the frontend site and serves content via API to be consumed on mobile devices, applications, or IoT. This gives great flexibility for headless Drupal users.
Meets the need for intuitive user experiences
Bringing together Drupal with a frontend Javascript framework is a smart strategy for making the most out of Drupal's capabilities for content creation and data storage while at the same time create easy to use, fast frontend applications.
If you're thinking of choosing a headless Drupal approach for your next web development project, combining these two solutions will offer greater functionality—why not enjoy the power of Drupal's modules and the intuitiveness of a Javascript frontend application at the same time?
You can really have the best of both worlds!
Technological reliance is widely spread
This means you get to be more dynamic in managing frontend technologies without the need to re-architect large Drupal backends. From a developer's point of view, this is a real blessing.
Many businesses redesign their websites every few years, and separating the frontend from the backend makes it much easier to rebuild. This saves a lot of resources and reduces the expenses associated with rebuilding Drupal websites.
Drupal works best with a headless approach
One of the reasons Drupal is often chosen for a headless project is because this CMS has most of the required functionality and API modules. As the Drupal community is committed to continuously make Drupal a reliable API-driven CMS, Drupal is known for efficiently serving and receiving content via APIs.
Microsite manager
If you need to create multiple separate websites, a headless approach is the right way to do it. It's a lot easier to build one content engine such as Drupal and use it to deliver content to all microsites. As a result, you'll have all your content in one content hub, and you'll be able to create and close microsites when needed quickly.
What are the challenges associated with a headless approach?
Before deciding to opt for headless Drupal development, you might want to consider these aspects:
A headless infrastructure is harder to manage than a traditional Drupal site
Keep in mind that headless development can be complicated and complex, and you might need a professional developer or Drupal agency, like Optasy, to help you on the way.
Headless Drupal is more expensive
You're likely to spend more resources with a headless approach as you now build two systems. The development process will take longer, and therefore the expenses associated with it will be higher.
You'll have to manage two teams
Since headless Drupal requires two separate components, that means that you'll often have to manage two teams (backend and frontend). At this point, you want to ensure that you enable great collaboration and coordination between your teams as data models have to be agreed upon.
Higher maintenance costs
As decoupled systems rely only on REST API, maintaining these systems to function properly requires intense testing. Compatibility issues when editing and making changes can arise between the two systems. What is more, security updates are required more often as there will be a need to patch more than one system.
How to decide
If you're still torn between traditional Drupal projects and going for a headless approach, seeking advice from Drupal experts might be needed. At Optasy, we offer expert guidance based on your business needs so that you can get the most out of your next web development project.
Photo credit: Nubleson Fernandes on Unsplash.
Raluca Olariu / May 06'2021
The eCommerce market is getting more competitive. As the digital world expands at a rapid pace and online stores become the norm, eCommerce retailers must find new ways of differentiating their brands from the competition. A reliable method of building a solid online presence is search engine optimization (SEO).
To generate more organic traffic on your website, you need to improve your search engine rankings. With the right SEO strategies in place, you will not only rank higher on Google but also get more value from your Magento eCommerce store.
Keep reading this article to discover five SEO tips for driving better search engine rankings and organically grow your business.
Tip #1: Optimize Meta Tags.
Title tags and meta descriptions help search engines understand the content on a page. Optimized and well-written meta tags can attract more visitors to your site and increase your organic traffic.
SEO-friendly page titles have between 50-60 characters and include the main keyword from a particular page that you target. When it comes to meta descriptions, their length should be between 50-160 characters and incorporate primary and secondary keywords. Although inserting keywords is essential to improve your SEO, it's also important to pay attention to the way your description sounds. It shouldn't be forced or unnatural.
Tip #2: Realize an SEO-Friendly URL Structure.
When working with Magento, it is advisable to use the following URL structure for your pages:
website.com/category-sub-category/product name/ for product pages
website.com/category/ for category pages
website.com/category/sub-category/ for sub-category pages
To remove the "index.php" part from your URLs, you need to enable URL rewrites. You can do this by clicking on Stores - Configuration - General - Web, then enter the Search Engine Optimization tab and then click on YES in the Use Web Server Rewrites section.
By doing this, you'll create cleaner, more readable URLs, which will make it easier for you to complete a website migration in the future if that will be the case.
Tip #3: Spend Some Time on Product Descriptions.
As many eCommerce sites sell products manufactured by other companies, the product description they receive from the manufacturer is often the one actually used on the site. Consequently, product pages may end up containing little valuable content that doesn't provide significant insights to visitors. Also, Google doesn't usually rank these websites very high, so you need to start creating your own unique product descriptions.
Tip #4: Accelerate Your Site's Speed.
Today, speed and accessibility are what digital customers are looking for. Around 40% of people abandon a website that doesn't load in less than three seconds. A ranking factor used by Google for mobile is page speed, so it's essential to take all the measures to accelerate your loading speed.
Here are some tips for this:
Migrate to a new host. Try searching for a Magento hosting package as it will be optimized for Magento's infrastructure and capabilities.
Use browser caching. By doing this, users that visit your website won't need to download the same files each time they enter your site, which improves load speeds.
Don't forget about a content delivery network. There some free options on the market that you can use with confidence.
Tip #5: Leverage Magento SEO Plugins.
Fortunately, Magento has high-quality extensions for boosting your website's SEO, like ReloadSEO or SEO Suite Ultimate. Investing in SEO extensions is a great way of taking your SEO efforts to the next level and improve your SERP rankings and organic traffic.
Or you could let a team of experts like Optasy do the hard work for you. We can help you build your SEO-friendly website and grow your business in the digital world. Don't hesitate to contact us for more details.
Photo credit: Myriam Jessier on Unsplash.
Raluca Olariu / Apr 22'2021
Our last article discussed some of the critical Magento extensions for marketing and customer experience. This blog post contains valuable insights into other essential Magento plugins that target financial, shipping, and analytics aspects. Keep reading to discover how these extensions can improve your conversion rates.
Magento extensions for payments
Stripe Payments
This Magento extension is used for processing credit and debit cards, as well as mobile wallets. If you want to position yourself as a trustworthy seller and deliver safe and secure payment options, Stripe is a must-have.
Benefits:
Great integration. Stripe recognizes and accepts all major credit and debit cards and a wide range of currencies.
Modern features. With Stripe, you can also use mobile wallets such as Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Compatible with a multi-store scenario.
Provides secure payment processes by using advanced machine learning algorithms.
OneStepCheckout
This is a very handy extension that simplifies the checkout process of your Magento store. Shopping cart abandonment is a real problem for online retailers nowadays, and the Magento eCommerce platform offers an overwhelmingly complicated checkout process.
By installing OneStepCheckout, you'll make it easier for your customers to complete a purchase and increase your conversions.
Benefits:
Accepts all major payment providers.
Cost-effective checkout solution.
User-friendly and responsive design. This extension looks and works great across various screens and devices.
Highly customizable. Adding and removing fields is easy with OneStepCheckout.
TaxJar Sales Tax Automation
Sales tax can be a burden for many business owners. Fortunately, TaxJar can do it for you. With its automation capabilities, this Magento extension helps you prepare returns and calculate your taxes more efficiently.
Benefits:
Real-time sales tax rates and calculations. Access TaxJar's APIs and real-time sales tax rates at checkout without compromising on the performance of your website.
Seamless and automated filling. With TaxJar's AutoFile feature, you can rest assured that your returns will be submitted correctly, on time.
Global rates. You can also use Tax Jar for taxes across multiple countries with accurate rates.
Magento extensions for shipping
Delivery Date
FIne-tuning the delivery schedule for your customer needs will definitely boost your store's credibility and profitability. With Delivery Date, there will be no more missed packages due to the ultimate shipping customizability feature.
Benefits:
Flexible. Allows the customer to select the date and time of their delivery.
Delivery notes. Customers can leave comments and provide additional instructions for the delivery.
Exclude dates. Delivery Data allows you to exclude any date from your delivery options.
ShipStation
ShipStation powers shipping efficiency of all sizes. Order management is essential for large eCommerce stores, and it can become challenging. This Magento extension supports businesses in managing their shipping without headaches.
Benefits:
Returns are easy. Returns and refunds are streamlined for better customer experiences.
Centralized orders. With ShipStation, you get to keep all your orders and shipment details in one place.
Order confirmation.
Shipping Suite
This complex Magento extension provides customizable shipping and logistics for eCommerce stores. Shipping Suite is a 3 in 1 solution that allows you to take complete control over your delivery process through 3 innovative shipping management tools: shipping table rates, rules, and restrictions.
Benefits:
Shipping approximations. Your customers are well informed about their shipping in advance thus reducing cart abandonment.
Highly customizable. You can choose which delivery providers to use and select the rates based on location.
Magento extensions for analytics
Google Analytics plugin for Magento 2
Easy yet powerful, this extension helps retailers track their web store's traffic more efficiently.
Benefits:
Better customer insights. This extension allows you to track your customer's activity in your store.
Enhanced marketing. With better customer visibility comes better monitoring of your marketing campaigns.
Improved personalization. By understanding your customer's behavior more clearly, you can act upon personalizing their experience on your site.
Advanced Reports
This Magento extension helps marketers with data visualization and management. It includes several reports and monitors different sales performance metrics in your store.
Benefits:
Specific reports. You can analyze your reports based on categories.
Payment and discount tracking. With Advanced Reports, you'll be able to see how your discount codes are performing and which payment methods lead to the most conversions.
Magento extensions for security
As security is getting more and more critical in the digital environment, security extensions are a must to keep your online store secure.
Two Factor Authentication
Through this extension, you can improve your protection against fraud and identity theft. The Two Factor Authentication (TFA) algorithm adds an extra layer of security to your website and reduces the risk of cyber theft.
Benefits:
High compatibility. TFA works with several operating systems.
High security. The secure code sent to your configured smartphone to complete the log-in process is only available for 30 seconds. This prevents someone from hacking your website.
Failsafe. With TFA, your eCommerce site will be secured even if the security of your passwords is jeopardized.
Fraud Prevention
To avoid fraudulent purchases and payments, installing this Magento extension is a must as it helps you track and block suspicious payments.
Benefits:
Automatic fraud detection. The extension automatically blocks purchases that match previous suspect purchases.
Custom blacklisting rules. You can create blacklist rules based on various customer attributions like name, address, ZIP, or IP address.
Conclusion
Magento is a reliable choice for building and managing robust eCommerce stores. However, to make the most out of its capabilities, installing Magento extensions is necessary. You're now familiar with the most popular and useful plugins for enhancing and securing your website.
If you're still unsure which extensions you should select for your site, send Optasy a message. We'll gladly support you in your journey towards building your successful eCommerce business.
Photo credit: geralt on Pixabay.
Raluca Olariu / Apr 19'2021
As one of the most popular eCommerce platforms, Magento empowers retailers to build engaging, shoppable customer experiences in the digital world. By leveraging next-generation technology and a massive extension library, Magento helps B2B and B2C organizations create highly personalized shopping experiences for their customers.
Since the level of customization is so high for Magento users, they can often find it hard to choose from so many options and decide which plugins and extensions are truly efficient for their business needs. That's why we've created this article, to shed a light on some of the most useful and reliable Magento extensions that can help you make the most out of your Magento eCommerce website.
Magento plugins for marketing
Facebook Pixel for Remarketing
This Magento extension collects data from your customers that browse your products and then runs your ads to those users when they enter the social media platform. You want to keep your product in front of your customer's eyes and here's where retargeting and remarketing play a crucial role.
Benefits:
Automatic. Collecting user details is done automatically by Facebook Pixel—no installation is required on your end.
Easy exporting. Facebook Pixel lets you easily export products you want to promote on Facebook.
Event tracking. You can personalize the way your customers interact with your brand and content by tracking events in your store and sending that information to Facebook.
Omnisend
If you're searching for an all-in-one omnichannel marketing automation tool, then this suite is the right choice for you. Keep in mind that this is not a typical email marketing tool. Omnisend allows integrating multiple channels (email, SMS, web push notifications) in the same automation workflow.
This extension can be integrated via an open-source plugin developed by a 3rd party.
Benefits:
Robust automation. In the era of digital workspaces, being able to bring all your channels together and integrate several channels in the same automation workflow is a must.
Easy message building. The visual email composer offered by this extension allows users to use a template or build their content from scratch in minutes.
Streamlined targeting. By using segmentation based on profile data, shopping behavior, and customer engagement, targeting is much easier to manage.
Contact capture. With the help of landing pages, embeddable forms, and dynamic pop-ups, you can capture contacts more easily.
Mconnect Customer Specific Product & Price
Personalization is a big deal in today's digital world so this extension should be part of your arsenal. How does it work? Let's say you want to personalize a particular segment of customers to receive a specific sale. With this extension, you can update it so only particular customers see your sale prices. The same way goes for on-site product listing so you can show customers only the products they are interested in.
Benefits:
Persoalization, personalization, personalization. If you want to thrive in today's competitive digital landscape, your site content and your omnichannel campaigns must respond to your customers' needs.
Customization. With Mconnect Customer Specific Product & Price, your customization capabilities are endless and will allow your store to respond to customers with products, prices, and relevant content.
Priority for prices. You have the power to decide which price gets priority for a particular segment.
Magento extensions for user experience
Yotpo Reviews
According to a recent study, 91% of 18-34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Customer product reviews are an invaluable resource for developing customer trust.
Yotpo's Magento extension supports you in collecting and publishing reviews on your website from customers that have made a purchase from your store.
Benefits:
Social media integration. You can easily share your reviews on social media.
Product images. Any customer can upload images with the items they've purchased for more credibility.
SEO boost. Use snippets, Google Seller Ratings, and Product Listing Ads to boost your reviews index.
LoyaltyLion
Any successful eCommerce marketer knows that a loyalty program is essential to transforming customers into a community. This Magento extension improves the customer experience by allowing you to provide referral codes and rewards to your customers thus encouraging them to share your services with friends and family.
Benefits:
Loyalty points. With this extension, your loyal customers have the opportunity to earn activity points which they can use later to claim special rewards.
100% customization. You can personalize your shopping program so that it fits your business and customers.
Loyalty tiers. Your most loyal users will earn the best rewards which will motivate your shoppers to interact with your brand on a constant basis.
These are the most powerful Magento extensions for eCommerce websites that target marketing and user experience. We'll be back with part two of this article to discuss more details about Magento extensions for payments, shipping, analytics, and security.
If you want to expand your Magento web development capabilities and empower your website to build robust digital experiences, check out Optasy's leading services in developing thriving web experiences.
Photo credit: geralt on Pixabay.
Raluca Olariu / Apr 16'2021
Magento is a versatile content management system (CMS) that offers outstanding mobile-friendly configuration and easy third-party integrations. As one of the most popular platforms for medium and big eCommerce businesses, Magento provides excellent flexibility and a wide range of integration and features that take customization to the next level.
However, working with Magento might come with some challenges like:
Slow loading times
Data security issues
Poor Google search visibility
Extension conflicts
While dealing with these issues is not uncommon in today's dynamic digital environment, there are ways to avoid regularly facing these challenges by implementing solid web development strategies and following specific steps. This article will give you key insights to better understand the process of building and managing Magento websites. It will also include expert tips and tricks from leading professionals in the web development industry.
If you are looking to fully exploit Magento development and get the most out of your web development plan, here are some tips and tricks that might help you.
1. Select your hosting provider carefully and make sure they provide reliable hosting services. When running an eCommerce website, connectivity issues are the last thing you want. The hosting server your website runs to can make a difference in your website's responsiveness and functionality.
2. Provide customized alerts that apply to the specific needs of your customers. By doing this, you'll not only ensure that your users are kept informed, but you'll also make them feel more connected to your brand. Basic alerts include alerts about price changes, and you can take it a step further by notifying customers when desired items are in stock.
Again, you'll kill two birds with one stone by following this practice, as it will contribute to your digital marketing efforts as well.
3. Add responsive parts and create a customized site that allows your audience to become more intimate with your brand. At this stage, you want to establish your brand and craft cohesive design schemes for all the elements that form your eCommerce website. Creating a responsive design element for mobile will allow you to build stronger customer relationships and satisfy your users' demand for accessibility.
As mobile devices are becoming the primary tool that connects your audience with your brand and content, you want to make sure that this connection is streamlined and effective.
4. Focus on selecting the best functions and features to suit the specific needs of your business. To set your website apart from your competition, you must choose Magento's features and plugins wisely. Spend some resources on finding out which functionalities speak to your customers specifically and add the most significant value to your website.
Your choice of Magento features should always reflect your business objectives and match your brand strategy, not the other way around.
5. Use tier pricing and group pricing to set your eCommerce business to success. How?
Reward your regular customers and those who buy more inventory in bulk with incentives to stimulate and keep them coming back for more. Magento's tier pricing feature is a reliable tool that can help you manage this financial aspect by allowing you to price items differently and offer incentives.
The feature doesn't require any edits, and it will show your customers exactly how much they save when shopping at your store.
6. "Make SEO a priority" should be the motto of eCommerce businesses. When optimizing your Magento website for SEO, you should focus on boosting your product pages.
Firstly, ensure that your content is straightforward, concise, offers the exact amount of data needed to inform customers, but do not exaggerate at this point. Secondly, you should pay attention to updating the URL key to create a search engine-friendly link to your products.
Lastly, fill in your metadata section of each product in detail and include a minimum of five relevant keywords in each description. This should make your website more visible on search engines and allow people to find your online store more easily.
7. Don't forget about images, as eye-catching photos are often the first item on a website that catches the visitor's attention. Also, ensure that you use relevant names for your images, describing them as accurately as possible. SEO-optimized photos attract more visitors and help your website rank higher on search engines.
Magento is a winning choice for eCommerce
Magento web development may be tricky sometimes, but it's worth investing your resource in building and managing your eCommerce website with this reliable CMS.
Magento provides a wide variety of features that meet specific business needs, and the platform is developed for secure and functional web development.
When it comes to SEO, Magento won't disappoint you. On the contrary, the platform is an excellent choice for beginners as well, offering advanced SEO features that maximize your chances of ranking high on search engines and attracting more potential customers.
See how Optasy can support your business by creating and optimizing your Magento project to match your objectives and your customers' needs.
Photo credit: Megan_Rexazin on Pixabay.
Raluca Olariu / Apr 14'2021
At some point in their business journey, every website owner can encounter the need to migrate their web host. As more lucrative hosting options are making their way in the industry–VPS, shared, or dedicated hosting—it's no surprise that many website managers choose to perform host migration.
This article provides support in handling one of the most popular DevOps services, hosting server migration, by outlining five essential steps that help you complete a successful migration.
When is the time to move your Drupal website to a new hosting server?
The decision to switch web hosts is not an easy one to take. The good news is that there are multiple signs that can make it clear that your website requires hosting updates if you know where to look. It won't be comfortable to acknowledge them, but as soon as you start on this journey, you are transforming your website for the better.
Let's have a look at how you can spot these signs on your Drupal website.
Downtime has become a recurrent issue.
Your customers demand availability and speed, so every time your website is down and unavailable for users, you risk building a bad reputation of unreliable and low-quality services. Your server can impact your site's availability if your hosting equipment’s quality is low or your host's security features and plugins provide poor protection capabilities, as cyber-attacks can often lead to downtime.
Your host is hard to reach.
As a website owner, you want to ensure that the communication with your web host is fast and streamlined. There may be times when your server crashes or you a server error, and you need to get in touch with your host as soon as possible to provide troubleshooting guidance and get your site up and running.
An unreliable host may not only affect the functionality of your website but can also cost you customers. Getting the support you need when it comes to your hosting account is paramount to provide high-quality user experiences. That's why making sure that you have a solid customer service team at your side at any time is good for the business.
Your current host costs you too much.
Web hosting can sometimes be the most significant investment when running a website. It's a recurring expense, so you want to ensure that you choose the best option. However, expensive web hosts aren't always necessary. You have to figure out if the features and the amount of server space that your host provides are a good fit for your site. You don't need to break the bank for hosting servers that don't serve your current needs. You can always review your needs and upgrade to a more expensive plan.
You don't get the security you need.
As far as investments are concerned, paying extra for a secure web host is worth it. A host that takes security seriously will bring significant benefits to your website.
By investing in a secure hosting server, you'll avoid losing data and parts of your website, having user data compromised, and losing credibility in front of your audience.
When choosing your web host, watch out for features and plugins like Secure Sockets Layer certificates, malware scanning, or server firewalls.
How to switch to a new hosting provider
Migrating your Drupal site to a new host is a process that involves contacting your current host, performing database backups, connecting to a new server, and uploading your files. It's not uncommon for issues like corrupted backups to appear during the migration process. Consider this when planning your migration, and think if you can save some resources by hiring a professional agency like Optasy to complete this process for you.
There are a few essential steps to follow when migrating to another web hosting server. Let's explore some of them.
1. Turn Drupal caching off.
This is the first step to take in order to avoid potential disruptions. Go to your Drupal admin dashboard and:
Click Configuration - Performance - Caching - Select "No Caching.”
Uncheck "Aggregate CSS files" and "Aggregate JavaScript files" in "bandwidth optimization" and click "Clear all caches.”
2. Backup your Drupal files.
Connect to your remote server - Enter the connection details - Hit "QuickConnect" and connect to the remote server that hosts your website.
In your main site's folder, download the content on your local device, and you've done backing up your Drupal files.
3. Export your Drupal database.
Go to the phpMyAdmin on your server's control panel in the Database section.
Click "Check all" on your Drupal site database, then "Export method and the SQL.”
4. Migrate your Drupal database to the new host.
Create a new MySQL database on your target server. Click "Import" at the top of your database, then "Choose File,” and press "Go.” You've now restored your site on the new hosting from the backup.
5. Turn on Drupal caching.
Go to Configuration - Performance - Enable Drupal caching. Kudos to you! You've officially migrated your Drupal site to another host.
Conclusion
Building and managing a Drupal website is a complex process, and hosting is one element that can be pretty challenging to handle. There are plenty of hosting options available on the market, and you might find it difficult to decide which one is the best fit for your website needs.
If you're considering server migration or just need some professional advice on how to handle your hosting server successfully, our team of Drupal experts at Optasy is glad to help.
Photo credit: bsdrouin on Pixabay.
Raluca Olariu / Apr 12'2021
In 2021, it is expected that about 27.2% of the world population will shop online at least once.
A lot of potential customers out there, right?
As eCommerce is becoming the new norm, digital businesses seek out ways to thrive in this competitive landscape and position themselves as leading trend-setters.
To do that, companies need to realize the power of digital transformation and how they can embrace it in order to support the modern demands of speed and accessibility that customers require today.
This starts with leveraging the right tools for building robust digital assets. One of these tools is represented by eCommerce platforms, which are getting increasingly popular for businesses that seek to deploy an eCommerce system.
Drupal Commerce and Magento are two of the leading eCommerce solutions on the market and are often seen as direct competitors in the industry.
This article provides a side-by-side comparison of these two platforms in regards to technical capabilities, development, costs, scalability, security, and mobile responsiveness. Hopefully, this information will help you narrow down your choice in order to ensure that you choose the best fit for your business needs.
Key eCommerce Capabilities Enabled by Drupal and Magento
Drupal Commerce was released in 2011 and offers an open-source application framework that supports retailers in building and managing inventory, track orders, or handle payments.
Magento's initial release was in 2008. This PHP-based eCommerce site provides high levels of PayPal protocol integration and supports 12 worldwide payment gateways.
Both platforms offer, through native features or third-party add-ons, the following benefits:
Intuitive, easy-to-use user interface and control panels. No technical knowledge is required to customize and edit basic features.
Full-featured CMS that supports social sharing.
Business-centric structure for online stores.
Native integration of inventory-driven advertising material
Integration capabilities with third-party analytics, invoicing, or quoting solutions
One thing to keep in mind is that neither of these eCommerce platforms is a "plug and play" solution and making the most out of their potential may require further expertise.
Headless eCommerce
The headless version of Drupal Commerce has been in the spotlight in the last few years. This new initiative is an eCommerce solution that stores and delivers content without a front-end delivery layer. It's an API-driven implementation that transforms eCommerce functionality, making it available across a wide range of potential host environments.
A headless eCommerce model inclines towards a more SaaS-oriented, platform-agnostic solution that allows for better employee adoption and considerable time savings across IT departments.
When it comes to Magento, the open-source eCommerce platform, headless eCommerce is equally prioritized. Both Drupal Commerce and Magento are supporting headless models as the future of eCommerce.
Pricing
Drupal eCommerce's technical cost of entry is free. However, depending on scope and scale, the costs of developing and maintaining performant and secure eCommerce servers might reach tens of thousands of dollars.
Drupal Commerce project costs are directly proportional with a business needs for specific development architecture, module integrations, custom theme styling, or particular feature integrations.
Magento's newer modules are not offered as open-source and upgrading from Magento Open Source to Magento Commerce might be challenging.
From this financial point of view, Drupal Commerce seems to be a clear winner.
Scalability
Drupal Commerce has relevant capabilities of staying highly performant at scale. However, this CMS platform does not provide out-of-the-box database sharding and it can only be implemented on a third-party basis.
Drupal Commerce has lower requirements than Magento Commerce when it comes to the web server—the minimum required RAM for PHP is 64 MB and production systems usually require 128 or 256 MB.
Drupal Commerce-based implementation splits the eCommerce experience across three related Drupal domains. As a result, scaling is better, bottlenecks are eliminated, and the content and purchasing experiences are efficiently separated.
On the other hand, Magento's cloud hosting solves a large number of scalability issues, although at a higher price. The minimum RAM requirement of 2 GB will probably not scale well and distributed networks or caching may need to be deployed with greater care to keep up with the heavy load.
Security
Drupal is proven to be the most secure CMS and Magento's infection rate is much higher than Drupal's. From the point of view of security, Drupal Commerce is a winner for businesses that want to prioritize secure platforms.
Source: Sucuri.net
Mobile Responsiveness
As most websites transition to a mobile-first approach, eCommerce platforms that prioritize mobile responsiveness are a must.
Fortunately, both Magento Commerce and Drupal Commerce provide robust mobile capabilities to satisfy the need for accessibility and performance.
Drupal Commerce's themes allow building a fully responsive design for eCommerce websites and offer screen flexibility for creating versatile experiences.
The most popular themes like Corolla or eStore provide:
Multi-level responsive header menus
Custom layouts and color options
Box shadow and background textures
Custom field additions
Magento Commerce is close to Drupal when it comes to mobile optimization capabilities. Its responsive web design features help users create optimal viewing experiences for multiple devices. Magento Blank or Luma are out-of-the-box themes that deliver a fully responsive design.
Who's the winner for eCommerce?
While both Drupal Commerce and Magento Commerce are reliable options for a digital company that wants to thrive in the eCommerce market, every business has its own unique needs and requirements. Choosing the software that best supports these needs is a process that involves a lot of research and planning.
If you want to speed up this process and ensure that you reach the right decision, don't hesitate to contact Optasy for professional advice and support.
Discover which platform is most suited to provide a robust eCommerce experience for you and your customers.
Photo credit: Mark Konig on Unsplash.
Raluca Olariu / Apr 06'2021