An aspect every business owner needs to ensure s/he has paid enough attention to is to sustain in the digital era and deliver their product and services to a vast sect of audience, also to obviously, to never go out of business. And every single goal is tick-boxed when you decide to take your business online.
So just imagine, building up a project that can never go out of business? A business that always has a vast audience to entertain?
Can you think of any business idea that assures an unfair advantage like that?
The businesses that never go out of demand. I can think of some, including food, clothing, and banking, all related to e-commerce.
Therefore, if you are skeptical of putting in a lot of effort and cost in developing a business, we say throw those doubts away and build an e-commerce application. That is never going out of fashion.
Although e-commerce applications are the way to go, they rock in all terms, be it demand, services, revenue generation, or anything else. But the platform is not easy to develop.
For example, now, the features that are added in an online shop are really more advanced than they used to be. Hence the requirements and expectations with a simple e-commerce platform are also on a constant rise.
Hence, to meet those “high demands,” the one technology that comes wearing a superhero cape is PHP.
However, you will have to hire a PHP coder to execute all tasks in an effortless yet efficient way.
Why PHP for e-commerce?
There is some simple point to point answers to that question. PHP is one of the most efficient technology to develop your e-commerce site with; it provides several advantages like:
- Lower development and maintenance cost, thanks to its open-source nature.
- Lets you add scalable and customizable solutions to your e-commerce platforms, ensuring it’s future-proof.
- It offers a variety of plugins, components, and themes. Also allows easy integration
- It provides out-of-the-box safety features, which are super important for an e-commerce platform.
- It allows for easy mobile optimization and is also compatible with multiple platforms.
- It has a huge community base that is always ready to help you in times of doubts and needs.
The advantages offered by PHP are hard to ignore, especially when you are creating an e-commerce application. Thus to ensure you take full advantage of all the pros mentioned above, you must start looking for PHP developers for hire.
Remember, the PHP market is highly competitive (since it’s the best), and to get an edge, you would need a professional to give you a push.
What are the greatest PHP frameworks that you can use?
The fact that we have many great PHP frameworks to choose from is not a secret.
PHP frameworks have always provided developers with ease, and product owners have an abundance of features to put in their sites.
Let’s see what great choices you have:
- Symfony:
Symfony is one of the oldest PHP frameworks, launched in 2005; it has accumulated great respect and reliability in terms of site development, thanks to the stability it has maintained since forever.
Symfony offers various advantages that can be easily integrated into your e-commerce platform, including:
- High flexibility
- Easy integration with different projects.
- Easy installation on multiple platforms
- Provides high performance
- Is very compatible with multiple operating systems
- Allows interoperability.
The only downside you may face with Symfony is a hard learning curve, so just look for PHP programmers for hire experienced in their field. You may not be able to work with a novice developer with this framework.
- Laravel:
Laravel and Symfony share some similar features. However, Laravel enjoys a little more stardom than the latter.
It is one of the most acclaimed open-source PHP frameworks of all time, even though it is relatively younger than the rest (launched in 2011).
The PHP framework makes tasks such as caching, routing, security, and authentication seem like sleeping on a flower bed.
Laravel also offers various advantages like:
- Allows developing a complex app with ease
- Offers features like data migration and customization
- Provides MVC architecture support
- Ensures exceptional levels of security, which is the life force of any e-commerce platform.
Also, since Laravel is relatively younger, there is a massive possibility of new innovations to emerge. This means that Laravel could offer a lot more features and functions that it currently does.
Therefore, if you build your e-commerce application with Laravel, you would be able to develop a future proof business solution.
Read More: CodeIgniter vs Laravel Performance
- YII:
The YII framework was released in 2008. It provides impressive lazy loading techniques that can drastically reduce your e-commerce application’s loading time by providing high-speed loading technologies.
YII also has some brilliant advantages to offer, including:
- It can be easily integrated with various frameworks (like Zend)
- Provides excellent performance to your technology
- Required little memory space
- It offers useful security features like cookie tampering.
All in all, the PHP framework is an excellent option for anyone who wishes to develop an e-commerce technology.
What do these frameworks provide an e-commerce website?
When we say a PHP framework is all that you need for your e-commerce website, we are not making baseless claims.
These frameworks provide your application and you with many incredible benefits like:
- Cost-Effective:
The one thing every budding entrepreneur wants to hear is- It’s affordable!
This is exactly what PHP provides you with- affordability. Since it is an open-source framework, you can save up a lot on subscription costs.
PHP offers inexpensive debugging and hosting, in comparison to its competitor ASP.NET, so any company that is free of Microsoft product’s shackles can welcome affordability with open hands.
- Integration and compatibility on point:
PHP is efficiently run on various platforms like Microsoft, Linux, macOS, and even UNIX. It can also be integrated with all primary servers, including Microsoft IIS and Apache.
An add on to all those functionalities is its ability to be integrated with other technologies like MongoDB, allowing it to operate with tools like Memcache and Big Data.
- It’s Super Fast(er):
Speed was always the USP of PHP, and it has increased a lot since the latest version (PHP 7) was rolled out. A recent report published by Zend Technologies suggests that a CMS running on the latest PHP version is much faster than the one running on PHP 5.6.
These fantastic improvements can also benefit e-commerce platforms like Magento. The same study explains that the PHP 7 consumes 30% less memory, the catalog requests are improved by 112%, which in turn drastically reduces load time.
Inflexion, a PHP development company, noted a decrease of 70% in the CPU execution instructions, thus providing better consistency.
What performance issues can your Ecommerce app face? And what are the solutions?
Ecommerce applications, or as a matter of fact, any app can face many performance issues in its lifetime.
Since we are talking about an e-commerce platform, let’s not deviate.
Your e-commerce application can be subjected to bad performance in many instances.
For example, you push a bad code into the server; in such cases, your application can generate bugs that you will not be able to justify. You may end up losing a bunch of your customers for a minor glitch.
We tell you what your application’s performance has a lot to do with its database. Therefore, you need to minimize the number of SQL queries hitting the DB server.
Hire a PHP coder to make sure your DB structure is appropriate, using the right indexes, and identifying the most widely used tables for both reading and writing.
Your app’s performance can also be affected by cache systems like Redis or Memcache. Your developer must assess the session data from a common store in case multiple servers are involved in your e-commerce platform.
Conclusion:
PHP is the right choice to make when it comes to building up an e-commerce platform. The wide range of famous examples enjoying their online time is the living (not so much) proof of PHP’s ability.
Ecommerce applications like Drupal, Joomla, Woocommerce, Zencart, Opencart, Prestashop, and many more are built using PHP.
These applications are famous for the ease they provide to their consumers. Some of these are a part of our daily shopping.
If they can make it big, so can you.
All you need is the right idea and a professional to lay out the roadmap to success. Start your search for a PHP developer for hire because the right time is now, and the right opportunity is just one advice away.