What it takes to be a Magento Developer or a Magento agency in 2023
February 13, 2023
6 things that every Magento agency should have in 2023
What is Magento?
Magento is a robust eCommerce platform which you can build online stores on top of. Magento is considered one of the best eCommerce platforms which can be highly customizable and create amazing shopping carts for selling online.
Please read our “What is Magento” blog post to learn more about the Magento store development.
There are more than 250,000 active eCommerce websites backed by Magento. The number is rapidly growing even at the moment of writing this article. Magento eCommerce software is one of the most reputed and robust platforms among the software development companies as the extendability and the flexibility it provides is very high. Magento platform is using the most advanced software development concept and best practices to make sure that it delivers expected security and performance of an eCommerce website. As a Magento development company, we have involved dozens of software development in Magento. Some of them were developed from the sketch and some of them are Magento maintenance of the websites that had been developed by either 3rd party Magento agencies or a Magento open source developer.
One thing we observed in acquiring the 3rd party website for customization, most of them are not able to not extendable or updatable at all. This is because web development has done without following Magento recommended standards.
Caution: Below paragraph can be a bit advanced for non-technical eCommerce online-store owners
As an example sometimes core files in the vendor folder have been edited for quick fixes which are not recommended at all for Magento software development. When you update a core file manually it will be removed when the next ‘composer install’ runs or once setup the deployment through a repository as core files are not committed to the repository. Another common mistake we have noticed is that writing the model logic in the controller or worst writing raw SQL queries in the view (.phtml) files. I have to mention one more point to end the list of common and critical errors done by most of the experienced eCommerce software developers. Magento 2 utilizes a lot of resources to facilitate the extensibility and it has an advanced fallback mechanism. So to minimize this resource utilization, Magento recommends using Varnish as an HTTP accelerator. What HTTP accelerator does is keep a copy of the full HTML page against the URL when the page is requested for the first time. Then it sends a full static file if someone requests the exact same URL. By generating dynamic content with HTML will avoid using this kind of useful eCommerce software development tools which is vital for the performance. If you are a Magento2 extension development company or Magento Freelance Developer Make sure to avoid the above mistakes as we have seen them more than often. Describing the technique of how to overcome this issue will be out of the scope of this article. If you want to know the best way to handle this comment below so I will write another article for it.
So with that long introduction, let’s dig deep into the points of the main Topic.
1. Learn Magento properly before you start any development
Though it is obvious, there are reasons for mentioning this as our first point. If you need to be a production-ready Magento Developer it would at least take 3 months of training on the platform. Once you have to go through the training it is recommended that you work at least under a senior developer for another 3 months before starting any Magento Development alone. I have come to these numbers based on my own experience of training Magento Software Developers on both Magento 1 and Magento 2 eCommerce platforms. As a bonus, with this article, I am giving away the training schedule I have prepared to train the Magento Developers at NeoSolax. This training schedule has altered over the years by identifying the potential knowledge gaps of the trained developers. Any individual or Magento software development company is welcome to use this as a boilerplate to train your Engineers.
2. eCommerce Search Engine Optimization
Should you care about SEO as a developer? Your answer should be yes if you want your merchant to get more and more traffic to increase their sales. Any web developer or web designer should learn at least basic SEO in order to succeed in their career. Magento web developers and Magento web designers should have a good idea about eCommerce SEO as well. This is why almost all the SEO features in the Magento Commerce (Earlier Magento Enterprise) version are available as Magento 2 open source features as well. It is the responsibility of the Magento Agency or the freelance developer to use these available features appropriately and educate your client about the importance of doing content-management correctly from the eCommerce store backend. In order to do so, you should at least have a proper understanding of all the Magento out of Box SEO features correctly. However, if you love to learn more about SEO and the way a search-engine looks at your content, I would recommend subscribing to Neil Patel YouTube channel and follow him through social media.
3. User Experience
Magento UX design is a very important factor of any Magento shopping-cart. After all, it is the storefront that customers experience when they are on your website. Like SEO, it is not only a web designer job to make sure the Magento eCommerce web design has a higher conversion rate. Very often designers come with different backgrounds like Shopify, wooCommerce like CMS based eCommerce platform. I have seen that many of them have great skills to design beautiful websites yet convert less traffic to checkout. In that time, you have to come forward and instruct them to certain factors like having a prominent call to action buttons and to make sure they are easily clickable. Also, you may have to help UX designers to design Mobile first and friendly design. Another factor is sometimes fancy design can be hard to implement and convert to a responsive design with available timeline and budget. That time as a developer you have to make the suggestions to change that will not destroy the aesthetics of design and UX friendliness.
4. Performance Optimization
This is definitely one of the responsibilities of the Developers. Performance is key for the Use Experience, Conversion and SEO. As a best practice, QA should pass a page only after if it performs better with the google page speed. CPU and Memory utilization should be considered when developing each and every function. One wrong function implementation can cause the whole website to be slow. We have integrated a plugin from a 3rd party Magento 2 extension development company and found out that the site becomes very slow. After days of debugging, we realized that it deleted internal caching several times for a request. If you are a Magento extension development company or a developer you should make sure that your extension should be developed according to the Magento guidelines. As I have mentioned earlier also, I have seen a lot of extensions that do not support varnish caching which causes a performance hit. Specifically when it comes to mobile Magento frontend developers should have the understanding to upload the optimized images which should not need to be resized by the CSS.
5. Magento 2 PWA
PWA is the future of web development. It is efficient, reachable, does not need 3rd party permission to host as an App and economical with one code base it can be implemented across several platforms. I was about to forget to mention, it can work up to some extent offline using the cached content as well. Speed is always a complaint with Magento and it is true up to some extent. Most of the time it needed better performing servers when the application is implemented in a way that does not support Varnish Caching. Mainly this is because to generate frontend HTML, the server has to dedicate a lot of CPU power and memory. But with the headless architecture, you do not worry about the server generating the HTML as it will only fetch the data through GraphQL. To make the explanation less technical let’s say that your HTML is performed (Not exactly) and directly rendered to the browser when the first request is going to the server. From there it will only request the data (Not the HTML) from the server. This gives a very less burden for the application server and therefore performance will be very high even when making it scalable. Another plus point will be the ‘new’ Magento frontend developer does not want to learn about the Magento architecture and continue with the knowledge he already has in Angular, VueJs or React.
6. Knowledge in the latest trends in eCommerce.
This is where you become an ‘exceptional developer’ from a ‘developer’. ECommerce is also evolving exponentially as technology. Business approaches of yesterday are obsolete today. It became multi-channel from single-channel, Omni-channel from multi-channel.
Below are some of the technologies that you should keep our eye on.
- IoT
- Voice Search
- Virtual Reality
- AI
- Big Data
- latest secure payment gateway alternatives
- Mobile commerce
- B2B trends
- ERP integrations (API communication Store to and From) and 3rd party integrations like Quickbooks and Email-marketing tools like Mailchimp.
- Feature release on the other shopping cards like BigCommerce, Shopify, wooCommerce, OpenCart.
Conclusion
When you read this you should understand that it is not easy to become a good eCommerce solution developer or in our context to become an exceptional Magento developer. You need to learn many things and keep updating your knowledge.
If you are Magento website owner or going to be an online business owner, we know it will be hard for you to find a good development team who completes all these criteria to develop your eCommerce site. Do not worry, NeoSolax (Pvt) Ltd has a pool of developers, well trained and experienced developers will deliver a very effective website for your eCommerce business. As a Magento specialized company, we improve our developer’s knowledge through various channels like tech talk and daily mandatory training hours. So, If you are looking for Magento development outsourcing please get in touch with us to set up and give your shoppers an ultimate shopping-experience.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Muditha Ediriweera is passionate about Magento and has nearly a decade of experience in Magento eCommerce development. He has developed a lot of Magento 1 and Magento 2 sites with both OpenSource (CE) and Commerce (EE) platforms. His experience is not limited as a Developer as he guides a lot of people to discover Magento platform capabilities in both code level as a Magento Trainer and features wise as a Magento solution consultant. Muditha is currently helping merchant to sell products online with Magento as a Founder & CEO at NeoSolax with his high calibre Magento development team.