Avoiding The Costs of Updating Your eCommerce Site’s Theme with Every Update

by | Oct 13, 2020 | Blog, Marketing, SEO | 0 comments

With eCommerce being more dynamic than ever before, Magento, Shopify and AbleCommerce seem to be shifting into high gear, releasing new updates regularly. This is great for performance, security and other aspects of building an online store and cementing an online presence, however, there is a downside that a lot of merchants in the industry find themselves facing due to this: incompatibilities. From our experience, picking a theme from sites like TemplateMonster.com or building leads to lots of editing when upgrades happen.

Platform Updates Create Problems

Platform updates have the potential of rewriting or changing certain aspects of the software that can cause extensions built upon it to function incorrectly or sometimes to stop functioning altogether. This is a huge problem for merchants because they’re faced with an important question they have to ask themselves upon each new release. “Do I update my site to the new version to benefit from all the new enhancements, security updates and features with the risk of breaking my store due to extension incompatibilities or do I stay on an outdated store version to keep all my current functionality, but risk my store’s security?”.
If you use Magento, this is a special concern, so we’ll dive into more depth about Magento, but the same concepts apply to picking a theme AbleCommerce or Shopify.

Pick the Right Theme to Start

We recommend WeltPixel’s Pearl theme. One of their driving, core values is compatibility with Magento updates. They chose to focus on this so merchants that use their products never have to worry about asking themselves this question in relation to their products. We take great pride in the fact that they release regular updates with improvements and optimizations, but even greater pride in the fact that every new Magento update is accounted for, and compatibility releases for those are their top priority. Whenever a new Magento version is made available, they follow up with a compatibility update a week or two later, depending on the magnitude of the Magento release, which ensures a sense of security that a lot of other merchants are unable to offer.

Let’s take, for example, the freshly released Magento 2.4.0 version. Their Pearl Theme, as well as their standalone extensions have already received a new update for addressing and confirming compatibility with Magento 2.4.0. Thus, merchants who choose to start on this Magento version alongside their Pearl Theme can rest assured knowing that the foundation they build their store upon is a strong one. Throughout their years in the industry, they found that this quality-oriented approach through which defining products are built and maintained is a much more appreciated one in the community, rather than the alternative in which vendors choose to develop a large number of extensions (sometimes hundreds), which are then left to proverbially “rot”. This approach will indeed, inevitably, meet a larger spectrum of needs, however, updating hundreds of extensions each time a new Magento version is released is a task that a lot of vendors simply cannot undertake due as it may take them hundreds or even thousands of development hours. More details about the theme can be found at the following link: https://www.weltpixel.com/magento-2-theme-pearl

A dynamic industry calls for dynamic products and adaptability has become one of the most important resources a company (as well as an individual) can have. The capacity to adapt can make the difference between finishing the race and getting lost in the dust, so in whichever way you choose to shape your approach, make sure it’s an adaptable one! So when picking a theme, make sure it’ll have support for future versions of the platform.

We’re Here to Help

Have questions? Get help with your design and navigation. Drop me a note and I’ll be glad to assist.

Brad Kort – [email protected]

Technical SEO for Ecommerce Websites

Whether you’re building a new Magento site, or just want to optimize your live storefront, getting it ready for search engines to index is critical. We present this checklist of 10 tasks for your use. Some of these tasks require a developer, and some don’t. Some can...

Pacific Press Case Study: How an Upgrade Drove Explosive Growth

Spoiler: “Visits by mobile users have exploded compared to our old site; we’ve moved from virtually none to almost 50/50. Over the last 28 days we are showing more than a 30% increase for sales, total orders, and conversion rates vs. the old site”. Pacific Press had a...

Time to Move to Google’s WEBP Image Format

If you've worked on websites long enough, you've seen the progression from GIF to JPEG and to PNG. The next image format is the Google-developed WEBP image format. Here we'll explain what WEBP is, describe the benefits of switch to WEBP, how to measure the difference...

Google Shopping Video Tutorial from the June Chicago Ecommerce Meetup Group Meeting

Google Shopping Tutorial If you're a merchant selling products, you should take a close look at Google Shopping. If your products are unique and/or price competitive, this tool could help you sell substantially more product. Every day, millions of people are using...

Web 2 Market Digital Marketing Case Study

American Technical Publishers (“ATP”) is an industry leader in textbook publishing for career and technical training. Founded in 1898, the company sells worldwide through its website on the domain ATPLearning.com and by phone order. As ATP improved its product...

How to GDPR prepare your online store?

GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is an updated version of the 1995 Data Protection Directive. With the advance of the different ways we go on the internet, a more defined law was in demand. The GDPR is drawn to protect the rights of all the European Union...

Learn how eCommerce with Magento helps expand Online Business

Online shopping is a billion dollar industry. And Magento has cornered the eCommerce market with more than 250,000 online stores in America alone. The reputation is because of the Magento program’s ability to fit any online business. All that stops you from standing...

Magento website templates – How the right template can boost sales?

Magento is an out of the box eCommerce software. And it also has a free Community version which is the most popular. Because of the way Magento is set up, no two online stores look and feel the same. The uniqueness comes from the way the store is designed using...

Hosting for Magento – How to find the right hosting for eCommerce stores?

Magento is a huge program to host. Without a great hosting partner, the Mage program loses all its benefits. Coded on the PHP framework, Magento is a very popular program that comes without a host. The one click out of the box store is easy to install. However it is...

eCommerce Magento theme – How to choose the right theme for your online store

eCommerce Magento theme involves different ways to go about it. Magento is an open source program which comes with a theme and a blank theme file which can be worked on. This helps online stores to add unique features to their store. For example, you can create blocks...