As promised before Christmas (Magento 2 with PHP 7), here’s our thoughts on Magento 2.0, and why you should be thinking about upgrading. The Magento Team are promoting a number of new features, which allow site owners to boost conversion rates as well as improve performance and scalability, which should lead to increased productivity and profitability growth.
Magento 2.0 Improvements
More Flexible Architecture & Page Caching
Magneto 2.0 is a fresh start, with a cleaner, modern base code. The code is much more efficient, and the system builds your pages in a static file system (cache), rather than querying the database each time a page is loaded, leading to up to 5 times quicker page loads!
The new code simplifies customisation and development too, as they have released lots more extensions, along with a more flexible and extensive API system.
Improved Customer Experience
Magento 2.0 is 25% faster for end users browsing the site (standard, out of the box installation), and 52% faster adding products to the cart than the current Magento 1.x platform! What ever way you look at that, it’s a big improvement!
Long with the speed improvements Magento 2.0 also comes with new responsive design reference themes, and the ability to add Videos to products, alongside the existing Photos & Description fields.
Our favourite improvement with Magento 2.0 has to be the improvements to the checkout process – it now requires less information, and you can complete the checkout in a few steps. These changes help improve conversion rates as the less information you ask for on a checkout page, the more likely people are to check out.
If you’ve been in the world of credit cards for a while, you know that anything that starts with a 3 is Amex, 4 is Visa, and 5 is MasterCard. Magento always used to ask for the Credit Card Type, but this unnecessary step has now been removed, as the system selects the card type based on the credit card number.
Finally, there is an opportunity to create an account directly on the Order Page. Earlier, when site visitor checked out as a guest, it was very difficult to save personal information as a customer account. Now, it is possible to do with one single click, and at the time when it is really necessary.
Better Payment Gateway Integration
Magento 2.0 has made improvements to the payment process including the ability to add an inline iFrame that allows a payment form to be hosted by a third party, but still be embedded in the checkout process. This allows having the credit card payment page area processed elsewhere, which mitigates the risk of credit card data being stolen from your site.
Improved Productivity
With a new Admin panel design that provides a streamlined interface, administrators are able to spend less time for managing everyday tasks. The updated interface has one more essential feature – it is touch-friendly, meaning that you can use the admin panel much more easily on your smartphone.
Magento 2.0 provides the ability to bulk upload images to SKUs, and you can use more of a visual editor to create attribute values, including checkboxes, that make it a lot easier to figure out for the average Magento admin user.
Improved Scalability & Performance
On new Magento 2.0, catalogue and checkout pages are loaded considerably faster, as Apache Varnish is pre-integrated to cache page content. Code and images are also optimized for faster loading. Moreover, Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also performs enterprise-grade scalability and high availability with standalone master databases for key subsystems. You can have one mySQL database that is responsible for serving all of the content pages, product and category pages. You can scale this out with caching, and allow tens of thousands of people to hit these pages. But once someone adds something to the cart, you can separate this out to have the checkout process use a completely separate database. This allows you to have much, much better performance, and make sure that people who are trying to checkout won’t be slowed down by people just trying to browse (but not purchase). For bigger sites that do 5,000+ orders a day, this will make a big difference.