So you’ve built up your Magento eCommerce page. Let’s say you’re selling amazing organic, top quality tea on your online store. You’ve got your pages looking sleek and the start to finish checkout process is a breeze. Your customers love your products and the ease with which they can shop.
Now you’re maybe thinking about adding a bit more meat to your eCommerce Store to keep your customers engaged and bring new tea connoisseurs to your digital storefront. You might want to add some media pages with videos, tap into your vibrant social media feeds, or even start a blog to bump you up in those search rankings. Everything outside of your Catalog, Products Page and Checkout flow would fall under the purview of a Content Management System (CMS).
You know Magento commerce is a great foundation for your eCommerce platform functions, but you might have some doubts about its CMS capabilities. We don’t want you to worry about having to integrate with WordPress or Joomla to do all this. Magento is definitely able to meet all of your CMS needs.
In this guide, we’ll put your mind at ease and go into detail about how you can use Magento’s page builder as a CMS.
The ”drag and drop” editor. That’s the type of interface you’re going to get with Magento. It allows you to create pages with pre-designed templates and drag them in. Simply put, the interface lets you input and edit the fields you want to show on your front end and see how they will look before actually publishing them. You don’t need to know fancy code as it’s user friendly and very beneficial from a visual perspective.
If you’ve worked with other CMS platforms like WordPress or SquareSpace, it’s going to be a similar deal. You drag and drop the blocks that hold your content:
Now we’ll get into the steps and details about the capabilities of Magento CMS.
Let say you’re looking to add a more educational aspect to your site with some videos from tea experts. You’ve got a few on your YouTube channel and have been posting on social media, but now you want to bring them to a new page on your site.
In the CMS Menu, navigate to the Add New Page button to get started. You’ll have the following sections that you can edit to make your page look the way you want and do what you need it to do:
The Full Guide to Using Magento as a CMS
The Full Guide to Using Magento as a CMS
The Full Guide to Using Magento as a CMS
The Full Guide to Using Magento as a CMS
These are all the sections of the CMS interface that you have in Magento. Once you’ve entered the information make sure you hit Save Page.
Beyond the pages, Magento has something called CMS blocks. Now these need to be inserted within a page, catalog or other system page. They can’t exist independently on your site. You can also place them inside a CMS Widget (we’ll get into this next).
So what is a CMS block? It’s a lot like the WYSIWYG inputs you get when building content on pages, but with one main difference: you can add blocks in multiple places across your site. For example, you could have a block highlighting that you provide free shipping on all orders over a certain amount. You can lock this block in place on the bottom right of every page on your site and not have to add it separately to each one.
This is where you can make your site extra cool. Widgets are going to be all your bells and whistles like maps, top products, or social media feeds. These can be placed on Pages, in Blocks, or even have Blocks placed inside of them!
Since Magento is a fully customizable platform, anything you may need that hasn’t already been listed can be added in manually. You have complete control over your site and the codebase is fully editable. You remain in control of all the content, function, and layout of your site at all times.
This does require coding knowledge, but it leaves you in the drivers’ seat in terms of who you want doing the work. You can bring on an expert team to set it up, like 121eCommerce, or you can have your in-house developer work on small add-on projects to your site in their free time.
If none of the solutions above work for what you need done on your site, Magento offers thousands of extensions in the Magento Marketplace with a wide range of functions. They go beyond the eCommerce websites functions that are the platform’s main focus and include things like webforms or blogs.
You may seriously consider the blog extension, since there is, unfortunately, no built-in blog functionality on Magento. Blogs are quickly becoming a standard across many industries and a key factoring in improving your SEO strategy. For our tea example, we would definitely write a weekly entry about something related to the industry: tea traditions, highlighting a tea farmer, or focusing on the health benefits or certain herbs.
While Magento is primarily built to be the backbone of your eCommerce it is more than capable of also serving as your main CMS. You have the same type of functionality as your traditional drag and drop page builders, you have the WYSIWYG interface, and you have content blocks that can be applied across you site to reduce the need for replication of the same info.
Although you and your team will have to spend a bit of time getting used to the particularities of Magento as a CMS, the same would apply to any other platform. Once you get going, you’ll be happy you didn’t waste extra time and money trying to integrate your existing Magento platform with another CMS platform.