Do you know which content management system has the largest market share worldwide?  It's the popular blogging tool turned swiss-army CMS WordPress which according to a W3Techs survey account for nearly one quarter (24.1%) of all websites built in a CMS in the world today – far exceeding competitors such as Joomla (2.8%), Drupal (2.1%) and Magento (1.1%).
However, when you take out the blogging aspect and focus on selling online, Magento is the clear winner.  According to a study Alexa, Magento CE (Community Edition) was the most popular eCMS, with 25.6% of the market share, knocking the WordPress 'WooCommerce' plugin firmly into second spot.  Surprisingly, the premium Magento Enterprise Edition ranked in 6th place, powering a further 4.4% of the top million e-commerce sites.

why is Magento such a firm favourite for ecommerce business the world over?

Of course one of the reasons Magento achieves such great positioning is that it is specifically built for the purpose.   It has a range of functionality designed to enhance e-commerce sites for businesses of all shapes and sizes.  So why is Magento such a firm favourite for ecommerce business the world over?  Let's take a look.

Multi-store functionality

One of Magento’s killer unique selling points is it's ability to run multiple stores from a single installation.   The most common implementation is for international businesses who want specific content, pricing and catalogue options for end users in their different international markets.

Optimised for mobile

Smaller screens increasingly mean big business. In the UK, various studies have found that mobile users account for 40% of all online sales at the start of this year. The rise of smartphones is a global phenomenon and the biggest seismic shift in user behaviour the industry has ever known. Optimising content to display and perform better on a range of devices has become the most important part of website design.

Responsive design offers a one size solution that is simpler and more financially viable

Some development houses still push the m. url variant to direct mobile visitors to a mobile specific theme of a site. Although there are some benefits in developing separate mobile and desktop sites, the overhead in administration and development outstrips the gains in most cases.   Responsive design offers a one size solution that is simpler and more financially viable.  A responsive website recognises the size of the device it is being viewed on and formats itself to display properly on that device, be it desktop, tablet or mobile.
Out of the box, Magento 1.9 offers a responsive design reference theme that allows you to quickly set up your mobile-optimised site, a new payment option and streamlined checkout.

Performance & site speed

You want your site to look great but it also needs to perform quickly for every user. 18% of shoppers will ditch their basket if pages are too slow and 51% of online shoppers surveyed in the US say that an overall lack of site speed is the main reason they abandon a purchase.

Magento get's a lot of stick for being slow and unruly, but it's simply not true.  There are slow Magento websites out there, but they are guarantee you they are either poorly bespoked and sitting on a misconfigured hosting platform.  There are a number of ways you can speed up your Magento site. Think carefully about over using rich media such as videos that auto-play, especially if you’re optimising for mobile users. On a more technical level, Magento includes a suite of options like merging CSS and JS and enabling compilation – a Magento feature that allows you to compile Magento php files to create a single include path. This feature is designed to improve the performance of your site and is claimed to increase page load speeds by 25% to 50%.  Note compilation is not required and may be detrimental if you are already running PHP Opcaching on the server.

Ready for Enterprise?

As the top million e-commerce sites stats confirm, most ecommerce businesses are happy to use the Magento Community Edition. This is of little surprise when you consider it is free and has almost all the features of it's premium counterpart. The Enterprise Edition isn't exactly chea but it could significantly enhance the performance of sites for larger e-commerce retailers.  Magento EE was the second most popular platform in the 2015 Internet Retailer Top 500.

(Magneto EE is)... renowned for achieving superior server response times and CPU usage rates

With deeper features & functionality - particularly in its CMS abilities, plus a dedicated support line into Magento themselves, EE can offer a great business experience.  With stronger focus on faster and more resilient indexing, it is very adept at coping with larger product catalogues (particularly for stores with 500,000+) it is renowned for achieving superior server response times and CPU usage rates.

Content, content, content

Having the right platform gives you a great base to build your business from but you also need to create website content that captures the attention of users and is optimised for indexing in Google. An Econsultancy report found that "60% of companies see content engagement increasing and 30% of companies plan to invest more in creating original and unique content. They are making this investment to stay ahead of competition, as well as a way to improve SEO."

From writing engaging blogs and articles that can boost SEO, to relevant and unique product information, the cliche 'content is king' is still very much true. Plus using the right content and design with a flexible and functional platform like Magento can really help you succeed in your e-commerce business and bottom line.

If you're interested in adding blogging functionality to your Magento ecommerce store, we offer our own custom module: Pixie Blog - which you are looking at right now.  Get in touch for more information.