Content + Commerce: A Magento 1 End of Life Discussion
At the beginning of the year, the Hostdedi research team put together a report on the State of Hosting at the start of 2019. In it, we predicted that Data Protection would only increase in importance, headless implementations would become more mainstream, and development would improve as hosting infrastructure continued to decrease in visibility.
It’s now approaching the end of 2019, and many of these predictions have come to fruition. Most vitally, for ecommerce stores, this has meant an increased lack of division between content and commerce.
In 2018, 67 percent of Magento store owners stated that they plan to adopt PWA at some point in the future. Their reasons for doing as such were the improved development capabilities of headless implementations, and the ability to stay ahead of the curve. This wasn’t just because of infrastructure. It was also because of content.
The division between content and commerce isn’t what it once was. This means more opportunities in a wild west-esque content landscape.
According to Technavio, a leading market research company, the content marketing industry is set to grow by 16 percent between 2017 and 2021. According to their lead researcher, the reason for this is that “The effectiveness of traditional marketing is decreasing by the day. Companies must adopt the latest marketing trends to enhance their business and increase their consumer base.“
The important takeaway here is that companies are trying to adopt the latest marketing trends to stay ahead. In 2019 and 2020, that means content.
Is Content Marketing New?
Content Marketing is nothing new. According to the Content Marketing Institute, one of the first recognized examples of content marketing was from none other than Benjamin Franklin. In 1732, he published the yearly Poor Richard’s Almanack. The reason? To promote his publishing business.
Then, in 1801, the bookstore Librairie Galignani recruited a content strategist to help them grow their business. Most significantly, this meant creating a newspaper that featured excerpts from famous writers and books. And then there were many, many other content marketing efforts from companies around the world. Each more innovative and influential than the last.
Content Marketing has been around for a long time, but it’s only relatively recently that commerce businesses have started to ramp up its importance in the digital space.
Enter the digital age. Content marketing experts initially continued to invest heavily in traditional forms of content marketing. Then SEO started to make an appearance, and those strategies changed. Then Marketing automation and personalization appeared. Again, those strategies changed.
Today, content has become an important part of the buyer’s journey. It does more than just provide reading material. It helps to shape a brand, build advocates, and create a community that rallies around the same beliefs and ideas.
Enter Magento PWA and the Magento 1 End of Life
With the Magento 1 End of Life fast approaching, merchants now have an opportunity. Moving to a progressive web application is a very real possibility, and comes with a lot of advantages over current, single application deployments. A few of those advantages include:
- More front-end control
- The ability to create improved user experiences
- Reduced cost of development
- Cross device communication and mobile-first design
- Continued engagement through automated push notifications
- Improved multi-team collaborative processes
With these advantages, it almost seems as though PWA is the obvious choice for moving forward. Increasingly, hosting providers are also ramping up support for PWA application stacks. This means faster deployments, quicker page load times, and optimized development environments.
The Content + Commerce Mix: Magento Alternatives
Magento isn’t the only player in PWA. Also known as headless and decoupled, Drupal and WordPress have both been making strides into the space. Commerce platforms have also made a play, providing headless architecture as a way to satisfy the growing content demands of merchants.
There are headless and decoupled alternatives for several content platforms – most notably WordPress and Drupal.
One company doing this very well is BigCommerce. Their BigCommerce for WordPress (BC4WP) implementation has come a long way to offering merchants a reliable and scalable headless option. Moreover, with WordPress a well-known and well-used application, merchants are easily able to adapt their internal teams to the content management process.
The Possibilities of a Post-Magento 1 World
Now is the time to get your store ready for the next stage of its lifecycle. Now is the time to explore the possibilities open to you as a merchant for both improving the buyer’s journey on your site, and managing the complex range of development and content curation processes that already exist within your organization.
Interested in learning more about your options after Magento 1? Learn everything you need to know about the Magento 1 End of Life. Thinking of just moving to Magento 2? See how the two platforms compare and judge whether replatforming is right for your business. Alternatively, download our guide to After M1, offering a list of viable alternatives and why you should choose them.
Jeries is the VP of Global Channel Sales for Hostdedi. Jeries brings nearly a decade o f experience leading merchants and development agencies around infrastructure and cloud computing technical strategies. He’s consulted with over 100 different development agencies and has a passion for helping small businesses accomplish big goals. Jeries attended Wayne State University and lives with his wife and two kids in Detroit, MI.
