10 Reasons That Make Magento 2 So Awesome
The release of Magento 2 in 2015 set the e-commerce world abuzz with excitement. And people had good reason to await the launch of this platform with bated breath. The entire development team at Magento slaved away to pack this new version with as many features and improvements as they could.
Magento has always strived to hand over the reins to the user as far as customization is concerned, and Magento 2 is no different. But this is not the only reason why so many merchants are switching loyalties and opting for Magento 2. A closer look at the benefits of this platform will help make a strong case for it.
photo/ Michael Jarmoluk via pixabay.com
- Better Performance
47 percent of online shoppers want any website to load in 2 seconds or less. More concerning is the fact that 40 percent of them are likely to abandon the page if it takes longer than 3 seconds. However, Magento 2 offers a feasible solution as the platform runs 20 percent quicker than the first Magento version. The earlier Magento iteration is not built with a full page cache, which makes it a lot slower.
Magento 2, however, supports full page caching which makes it a lot speedier when it comes to loading times. Another highlight of Magento 2 is its compatibility with the latest MySQL 5.6 for query processing, re-indexing, and caching, making it a lot faster, more efficient, and supportive of website performance. The addition of Magento 2 forms is another step in the right direction that improves the performance of this platform. The custom form for Magento 2 allows users to create forms by dragging and dropping, thereby capturing customer information effectively. Check more: https://amasty.com/custom-form-for-magento-2.html
- Advanced CMS Content Interface
The brand-new WYSISYG interface for Magento 2.0 is a lot more polished than the previous version, allowing for greater focus on content creation. Given that an e-commerce platform with a subpar content interface will not win any favors in the industry, the developers at Magento have stepped up their game considerably to produce a new interface that stacks up well against the best in the industry. Magento seems to have learned from its past mistakes and created a content interface that improves upon the earlier version when it comes to creative control and content development.
- Better Admin Menu Navigation
Users found it hard to navigate between system configuration, catalog, products, and reports in the latest version of Magento. For inexperienced merchants, it was a veritable nightmare trying to memorize every path. However, with Magento 2 comes its all-new menu navigation, which enables users to navigate to any section of the admin panel as per their requirement. If that’s not all, the relevant information and details are easier to find with the help of the new interface and users can manage the store more efficiently.
- Sophisticated Product Creation Interface/Page
The new version of Magento comes with a step-by-step product creation tool, making it easier to form new products. Plus, it supports videos and images of the products, enabling users to add the media that best highlights their goods.
- Better Grid UI
A solid addition to Magento 2 is the vastly improved grid UI. Now, you no longer need to get in touch with the developer every time you need to add a new column. Thanks to the grid UI, merchants are able to select the required number of columns from the list featured in the Magento platform admin panel.
- Customer UI Interface
The earlier version of Magento checkout required customers to go through four or five steps before they could complete the order. Needless to say, the process was tiresome and time-consuming. With Magento 2, the entire process has been revamped, and merchants are now able to find the registered customer automatically by analyzing their email address.
What’s more, the registration process has also been simplified considerably. Now customers and users are able to complete the registration process on the checkout success page itself. No wonder the guest checkout percentage for Magento 2 is 38 percent faster than the earlier version of Magento.
- Full Page Caching
Magento, earlier, did not feature a built-in full page cache system. Thus, the site loading speed remained a major concern for customers. Plus, it affected the user experience significantly and caused sales conversion rates to drop. But all this is a thing of the past with the new Magento 2.0 release, which not only includes a full page cache system both in the community and the enterprise editions but which can be optimized efficiently so that the speed of the website shoots up considerably.
- Check out Made Simple
Nobody wants to spend an eternity waiting in line to complete their purchase, especially not online shoppers who experience short attention spans. For these people, Magento has come up with a new assumptive guest checkout method that consists only of two steps.
For a registered or guest user, the automatic email recognition property allows for a more streamlined checkout experience. For added convenience, the shipping rates are applied to a specific order only when the full details are completed. Also, the current iteration of Magento is a lot less intrusive than the first, asking for the billing address only when the payment needs to be made, not before. The first thing, however, that customers need to enter into the website during checkout are the shipping details.
- Improved Frontend Capabilities
The new UI library of the Magento platform allows for easier development of custom front-end widgets and pages. Extra widgets may include product widgets that simplify the process of adding featured elements and products to different pages, and CSS pre-processing with the help of LESS.
Moreover, additional RequireJS, CCS3, and HTML5 make the development process a lot more streamlined and modern. There is a blank theme featured on this platform. The base Luma theme has been improved considerably. Also, you receive access to all the minicart features out of the box. Most of the prototype can be removed for jQuery. At the same time, B2B e-commerce users can enjoy the faster, simplified quick order functionality.
- Advanced Development Capabilities
The new version of Magento platform features a composer dependency system, which makes updating both the core and the marketplace extensions a lot simpler and faster for the merchants. The console commands are a lot like a symphony, and the modules now happen to be entirely self-contained rather than being scattered among the different root-level directories.
Merchants can also look forward to better dependency injections so that the code base is a lot more modular in nature. In the new and improved Magento platform, the plugins minimize the need to directly override the classes. Thus, the extensions of the platform have a minimal chance of breaking each other down. And, if that’s not all, there is a built-in testing suite included in the Magento 2.0 PHPUnit. Users are able to add it easily to the new automatic tests so that custom features may be implemented.
A lot of users are also impressed with how modern the newer version of Magento feels in comparison to the earlier Magento software. With a thriving community giving this platform its full support, it’s only a matter of time before the software is upgraded further and at a quicker pace.
Sure, it might have taken two long years to reach this level of development, but the end results have been worth it, providing merchants with a solid enough reason to switch to Magento 2. As far as extensions are concerned, thousands of them have already been released for this platform, and they can be downloaded from the marketplace either free or cost or after paying a premium rate.
Concluding Remarks
Magento 2 proves that the platform is not out of the running yet as a serious contender for the best e-commerce builder. With several new upgrades and improvements to look forward to, your team should have no trouble converting potential buyers and providing a favorable customer experience.
Author: Alex Levitov
photo/ Gerd Altmann
