Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms used nowadays. With close to 250,000 Magento stores present today, it wouldn’t be wrong to assume that, when starting a new ecommerce website, Magento bags one of the top places in the list of platforms to use. With the support from a large intuitive developer community, host of easily available extensions, it is stands out as one of the most easily ameliorable platforms.
However, if not maintained well, Magento too can bring up certain serious issues too. At times the issues posed by extensions are small and can be taken care of effortlessly with no major effects. But many times, these extensions can also cause the whole website to go down taking a lot of time to fix while you lose thousands of precious customers and prospects. This is something you do not want your store to go through.
Given below are a few of many such drawbacks Magento extensions cause.
Some Serious Drawbacks of Magento Extensions
Website Continuity:
This is one of the most serious drawbacks of having too many Magento extensions. Website continuity means not getting a “Page Not Found” or Error Message when a link of the website is clicked on.
Magento extensions are developed by a thriving community and not all of them use the similar practices to make them. Magento architecture and file systems is extensive, having some 20,000+ files and 200+ database tables, it surely is a complex system. This is why, these extensions often end up in a conflict in code. Various extensions are developed being rewriting the same classes, which is one of the reasons of clash. This conflict further causes pages to crash and not show unless the code has been fixed. Although the Magento support team or a well-equipped Ecommerce Development Company can always handle such requests, your website will still be down for quite some time depending on the extensions used and will lose a lot of customers.
“Around 74% of visitors leave and never visit a website again after just one instance of a “Page Not Found” error”
This adds up to a significant loss in new customers. Too many extensions can lead to too many conflicts and hence leading to too many errors.
There are a number of Magento Conflict Checking extensions available too but the flip side is that these work effectively only if the extensions you have installed are developed on the defined architecture of Magento which is not always true; in such a case only a senior Magento developer can help you fix the conflicts.
Website Security:
This is another serious drawback that tags along the installation of third party extensions. Again since most of the extensions are created by an external thriving community, you never know which extension has a code to allow an easy backdoor entry into your website.
Third party extensions often offer some great functionalities for your ecommerce store. But often they contain lines of code that can’t function due to some restrictions or protocols in Magento’s core code. Hence they often add extra code that execute slight changes to the core of Magento.
Not only does this make your whole platform become a little different than the standard Magento platform, but will also cause it problems for you to hire ecommerce developers to maintain your store without complications. Also, these codes can further be used to gain access to all your website’s data and other private information that might cause some serious issues for you and your customers later.
Website Speed:
It goes without saying that in a competitive environment today, your website speed is one of the most important factors to keep the visitors hooked. By now you must have heard about the fact that:
“40% of users abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load”
Each Magento extension offers different functionality and features. Most extensions make HTTP requests to load assets like CSS, scripts, images etc. Executing each request takes quite some time and this in turn increases the page load time.
Conclusion
Magento extensions are great. They provide great features and functionalities and only work to make your site better. Even though there is no need to fear Magento extensions, you also shouldn’t trust them blindly. Be sure to reap the complete benefits of Magento extensions but also be aware of the costs that follow. Many times, simple features don’t even require extensions, so, Prioritize between the extensions you must have, the ones you just want to have and the Magento Customizations, then only make informed decisions only.
So in the end, how many extensions can we use at maximum, in order to avoid all the above issues?
I can understand security threats from third party extensions, but can official Magento extensions also pose similar threats?
@Corey, the threat of remote code execution attacks can even happen from bugs in Magento’s core logic, not just extensions. So official Magento extensions too pose a similar threat to your store as do third party extensions. Its best to ensure you get your store updated whenever a update with a new security patch is available
There is no defined number of extensions after which these problems can arise Jim. Sometimes, they could happen with just a couple of extensions. So its actually best to keep a check if the code of the extensions are in tandem with Magento’s core. Or at least get a professional to confirm it.
So should we use extensions or should we just try to customize Magento’s core to provide the functionalities?
@Kate Wherever customizations are possible, go for them. But if you feel comfortable with extensions, they would be fine too. You just need to make sure of its compatibility with Magento’s core.
Nice Article Good Information