Magento has been one of the most versatile online shopping platforms trusted by world’s leading brands as well as widely used by small businesses and start-ups. It is popular due to the fact it is open source and free to download thereby helping store owners to sell their products quickly and easily. Compared to other ecommerce solutions floating in the market, it has greater flexibility to manage the content, the design and the functionalities of the store.
The point and click nature of Magento also does away with unnecessary hassles of web servers or complicated coding. It is also scalable, meaning it grows with your business. If you want a new feature, it can be simply added from its vast list of extensions. Additionally, it has a huge community of talented and fast growing developers to provide support to the store owners. A lot of resources are available freely on various forums and blogs to guide the online shop owner on any issues.
Over and above, with the latest release of Magento 2, there have been a lot of improvements to this shopping application in terms of flexibility, scalability and performance while keeping in mind the optimum convenience of the user. Without doubt this new version will improve your business performance by leaps and bounds. But for those who have second thoughts about upgrading, in view of the financial and technical difficulties, can continue to use the old version as support from the Magento community still remains strong.
In case of any dilemma you might be having regarding the upgradation of your store, let’s have a quick look at the exciting changes you can expect with this latest release.
1. Magento 2 offers full page caching built into the community version as well as the enterprise version. What this means is that instead of the Web server having to do a tremendous amount of slow database queries to render a page, it operates on the server database to pre-render its each and every page into basic HTML. This reduces the load time from a time consuming 5-8 seconds lag to a neat 1-2 seconds, resulting in a faster page response for many eCommerce sites. Faster page load times allows for lesser load on the server due to the reduced number of disk reads and network round-trips.
This further provides for faster loading time in catalogue as well as check out pages, creating a richer customer experience. The websites can now handle much more visitors and traffic with ease without incurring huge costs on increased infrastructure. Consequently, translation to higher conversion rates occur which is a key factor on which Google rank websites, as a faster loading website is bound to earn a higher rank. This improved scalability of Magento 2 has the ability to cater to more than 2 million page views and approximately 250,000 orders per hour on a very busy day!
2. The Magento 2 comes with a wide range of extensions, which offers greater customisation as per the user’s requirements. If the software doesn’t come pre-installed with certain features that a shop owner might require, then the developer can easily take the advantage of the newly added features to extend the capabilities of his shop. Also installing and upgrading extensions in Magento 2 are now much easier. It in fact includes a standalone installer which will check for pre-requisites before it starts the installation process and thereby lead the way to a faster and smarter installation compared to the previous versions.
3. Magento 2 comes with a greater and effective database management compared to the previous versions. Magento 2 Enterprise version facilitates the separation of databases as per the functionalities of the store and handling of the traffic. Here the categories, products and content pages are designed to be served on one mySQL database whereas the checkout process uses a completely separate database. Over and above, the added feature of full time caching, facilitates for more conversions and richer sales experience for the clients. This results in the websites performing better, as dedicated resources are allocated only for the checkout facility. Hence people who are trying to buy are not slowed down by people just trying to browse. This makes a huge difference for big stores with thousands of visitors and buyers on any busy day.
4. Magento 2 comes with enhanced visual design editor with a drag & drop interface where users can easily start a theme as well as add their own features and customisations.
5. Other enhanced features of Magento 2 include:
• Enhancements in Admin Panel such as drag and drop product images, facilitating easier frontend development.
• Multi-warehouse support.
• Improved multilingual support.
• Improved and simplified checkout process.
• Improved security as Magento 2 is tightly integrated with PayPal, BrainTree, CyberSource, Authorize.net and WorldPay payment gateways.
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