After being rigorously tested in real-world conditions as part of its Merchant Beta program, Magento 2.0 is all set for its biggest release this November. Here are a few facts you should know about how Magento 2.0 is going to improve the performance of your business, ahead of its big release!
An Overview:
The Enterprise Edition module comes with streamlined checkout and payment processing. The code-base includes order management, standalone database for checkout, asynchronous grid fulfillment, product management and separation of store sub-systems. This module includes updates to import/export functionality, transactional emails, configurable swatches, and a whole host of merchant features. Strong performance improvements are brought about with holistic updates.
Though Magento 2 has been shot in the arm with a whole host of advanced features, the two key new features are without a doubt, full page caching and a simplified checkout system. Let us take a look at the top 5 business benefits of Magento 2.0.
- Full Page Caching: Full page caching catches a database-driven site and pre-renders the pages into basic HTML. This reduces the load time from 5 – 8 seconds to just about 1 – 2 seconds. The faster the page load time, the lesser the load on the server. This means that websites can now handle much more visitors and traffic, without having to shell out the big bucks for additional hosting infrastructure. The faster page load time also makes user experience easy, thereby resulting in higher conversion rates. And since conversion rates are a key signal used by Google to rank sites, your website is bound to rank higher.
- Simplified Checkout Process: To checkout, the end user has to punch in his/her email ID in the form. If the email address is found, they are asked for their password and the other forms are filled automatically. If not, the user can check out normally. City and State fields are entered automatically based on the pin code typed in. The ‘type of credit card’ field has been removed. Instead, the type gets automatically selected when the card number is punched out. So for instance, if you type out a number starting with 4, Visa gets selected; or for 5, MasterCard gets selected. Once your payment is complete and the order is placed, the user can then create an account to visit the site and track their order. And it does not matter if you have checked out as a guest. Magento 2 saves all guest information so that you can easily create an account with the saved information after you have placed an order as a guest. These features will smoothen out the entire user experience as well as result in high conversions of guest user accounts into customer accounts.
- Performance and Scalability Improvements:
- Updates to server-side architecture includes full page caching, support for HHVM3.6 and out of box Varnish 4 while the client-side updates include image compression, static content caching, and use of jQuery amongst others.
- New indexers in Magento 2 comes with more updates that help speed up query performance. Full page cache will now be available out of the box. Processes will no longer be blocked by refactored indexers as they will now continue to work in the background.
- Magento 2 is integrated with leading HTTP accelerator technology, and Varnish Cache that will cache common requests.
- Using Magento 2’s performance test scripts, you can now create test environments and test code changes.
- Overall performance gets an upgrade with the introduction of a separate database for order processing, increased browser rendering, reduced code, better image impressions and static content caching.
- Core improvements made in the admin site now give allowance for more admin users to create and update products while reducing conflicts in data.
- Speed: For end users, Magento 2 is 25% faster than Magento 1. In Magento 2, the system will be able to support 10 million catalog page views per hour as compared to the 500,000 page views on Magento 1.
- Easy Upgrades:
Upgrading the core software, as well as installing and upgrading extensions in Magento 2 are now much easier. Magento 2’s standalone installer will now check for pre-requisites before it starts the installation. This helps system integrators easily script installations and upgrades to create standard deployments. You can use the export/import functionality to export customer records, inventory data, product catalog, and so on and then import the same into Magento 2.
- Improved Backend:
Grid views of Page Titles, Inventory Levels etc. can be created in the admin area and information can be edited directly on the page in the grid just like how you would do it in a simple Excel sheet. This is extremely time-saving as you do not have to open each product individually and hit the sub-tabs to edit information. Bulk images and prices can now be applied to sets of images.
The Future of Magento 2
Even before its release, Magento has published a suite of improvements it plans to add to Magento 2:
- Performance and scalability updates
- Better preview functionality
- New search capability
- Usability enhancements for Admin Panel
- Multi-warehouse support
- Better B2B features
The Magento Migration
Magento is providing migration scripts in a bid to automate the migration of data. Team Magento has communicated that both 3rd party modules as well as the front end will require re-work to be compatible with the new approach. Magento’s official website lays out all you need to do ahead of its launch. You can get prepped for the big day here!
So, are you inspired to get your hands on the new Magento 2 immediately? Share your thoughts here.
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