Since giving the green-light on Magento upgrades back in April and a lot of clients have been asking about what's new in Magento 2 vs Magento 1.9. Magento 2.0 is a fresh start with an all-new modern code base. All legacy extensions and bad code has been removed. If you're an online retailer hoping for amazing new features - you'll be disappointed. Most of the enhancements are in the code "stack," however, there are some new bells and whistles that you'll be happy about:
- Full Page Caching is (proactive, materialization) built into both Magento 2.0 Community and Magento 2.0 Enterprise. Instead of your web server having to do a tremendous amount of slow database queries to render a page, this system builds out all of your pages in a static file system, so that page load times are 1-2 seconds (vs. 5-10 for non-cached pages). Previously only Magento EE came with this built-in.
- Guest Checkout is enabled by default. Nearly 80% of current Magento ecommerce sites have modified their checkout processes to better streamline the checkout process. With Magento 2.0 checkout, guest checkout is assumed, and if you’re an existing customer, you can still log out without having to remember your password. Little things, like having to choose your credit card type have been removed. These will hopefully improve conversion for retailers using the default checkout.
- Better performance and reduced table locking. Larger sites have seen issues in Magento 1.9 with table locking when too many people are trying to place orders or when admins are viewing new orders before they are saved. Magento 2.0 Community & Enterprise promise to have reduced the issue of table locking considerably.
- Ability to to separate your databases in Magento 2.0 Enterprise. You can have one MySQL database responsible for serving all the content pages, products and category pages, and then separate out the checkout process and use a completely different database. This allows for much, much better performance and ensure that people in the checkout won’t be slowed down by tire kickers.
- Key features built into Magento Enterprise: RMA, admin logging, gift registry, advanced customer segmentation, personalization, better PCI compliance, gift points and more. Eliminating the need for third party modules.
- Reduced JS code calls. In the past Magento need to load dozens of JS libraries to build a single page. This has been reduced, making page load times faster.
- Featured product widget based on condition filters to allow more efficient selection of feature products.
- Magento has replaced the prototype, JS library, with a jQuery library in order to keep up with industry standards.
- There is added support for PHP7 and MySQL Percona.
- Default themes “Blank” and “Luma” are fully responsive.
- Better administrative interface
- Better UX for B2B resources – quick order pages to enable wholesale type features, multiple shipping locations, negotiating pricing per user, and an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) entry point in order to accommodate integrations.
- Two-step checkout. The customer enters an email first, then creates an account at the end of their purchase.
- Static CMS homepage. Category pages can also be accessed through any of the primary navigation pages and display list views of products, filters, etc.. The product detail page includes 3 different categories: simple products, bundled products, and group products, and now you can see reviews at the product level. The cart includes a dropdown cart in the header, which is an added benefit for shoppers.
What isn’t new:
- You’ll probably still want to use third-party services for better reporting, analytics, fulfillment management, social integration, CRM, customer service, email campaigns, etc.
- There's still lots of missing core features that still baffle me, such as partial payments. Why Magento? Why?
Again, most of what you see with Magento 2 is... well... Mangento 1.9. However, you do need to upgrade sometime in 2016 before your current version starts becoming unsupported or insecure.
