Comparing the past and the future of Magento
In the nearly ten years since the initial release of Magento, the eCommerce platform has seen many versions and additional features to support both merchants and developers alike. Magento 2 introduced new ways to heighten user engagement, smooth navigation, improve conversion rates and overall revenue generation for online retailers.
With the recent release of Magento 2.2, in particular, the platform has gained some significant new functionality such as:
- Advanced Reporting on your business’ performance through Magento Business Intelligence.
- integrated fraud protection and chargeback prevention through Signifyd integration.
- a full suite of native B2B features including company account management, a quote negotiation feature, B2B credit purchases, and customizable catalogues and pricing.
Before even this most recent version, there were already a numbers features that gave Magento 2 an edge over its aging counterpart.
Speed & Performance
Slow page loading and poor checkout processes are often the Achilles’ heel of other eCommerce platforms. This can lead to increased bounce rates and ultimately cart abandonment, resulting in less online sales. Magento 2 solves this issue by reducing page loading compared to previous versions and other platforms.
Some of the main benefits of Magento 2 include:
- offering 50% faster page loading speed compared to Magento 1.
- checkout is 38% faster than Magento 1.
- capable of taking 117% more orders per hour compared to Magento 1.
- can handle 2.1 million more page views per hour than Magento 1.
- support for both full-page cache and Varnish Cache as built-in web application accelerators.
Admin Interface
The Magento 2 admin has been dramatically redesigned since Magento 1 and sports a fresh new layout. The new design prioritizes the user experience, with a focus on being both user-friendly and mobile ready.
In this newly designed Admin interface, you can access the following new features exclusive to Magento 2:
- Content Staging gives your business team the ability to easily create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates that changes automatically throughout the year on schedule.
- Search suggestions and recommendations powered by ElasticSearch – a powerful and highly scalable distributed search engine that is used by such high-volume sites as eBay, Wikipedia, and GitHub.
- apply integrated Product Videos as a part of your product pages’ media gallery.
- easily customize the catalog grid with extra product attributes.
Checkout
The checkout process in Magento 2 is streamlined and reduced to two primary steps – Shipping & Billing. With PayPal All-in-One Payment Solutions enabled, your customers can make payments online fast and securely. This PCI-compliant solution is now integrated into the checkout process. Unlike on Magento 1, it now matches your brand and design, and no longer directs users off-site to pay.
Maintainability
For developers, Magento 2 also makes a number of changes to enhance the application development life-cycle inline with modern industry trends.
- a plugin (or interceptor) class system has been introduced to help reduce conflicts among extensions that change the behaviour of the same class or method.
- the core code base has also been refactored using a dependency injection design pattern to create more modular and light-weight classes and reduce the number of large class files.
- the use of Prototype has been replaced with jQuery as the platform’s JavaScript framework. This is further supplemented by the use of RequireJS as a file and module loader. Together the number of JavaScript files which can be called is reduced, thereby improving performance of the online storefront and user experience.
- a revised directory structure reduces the number of root directories in the code base, reorganizing file to be more convenient and apparent.
- support for CSS preprocessors to enable more maintainable stylesheets and make writing CSS easier.
- promotion of Test-Driven Development.
eCommerce Enhanced
With Magento 2 you can take the next step in the Magento ecosystem and make your online retail experience better for the customers and the merchant with:
- performance improvements,
- a revised admin interface,
- a refreshed and responsive frontend design,
- faster shopping experience,
- a simplified checkout,
- B2B functionality,
- and improved security.
Want to learn more about how we’ve help retailers grow on Magento for 10 years?
Click here to connect with a commerce expert at Demac, or click here to learn how we helped this Magento clothing retailer increase revenue by 200%!
The post Two is Better Than One! – Magento 2 vs. Magento 1 Features appeared first on Demac Media.