Magento 1 vs. Magento 2: Should you upgrade to Magento 2.0?

After much wait Magento 2 was finally out late last year. Yes, you read it right! Magento 2 which was creating buzz has entered into the market and it is performing well than its anticipation by the entire e-commerce community. It is proved as much faster in the performance of catalog, pages render and in adding the products to the cart. With the new version of Magento i.e. Magento 2 the responsive theme has been improved a lot and become more user-friendly especially in the admin. Let’s see what new features Magento 2 has brought and how it is better for us.

 

The big changes and modern tools and technologies which Magento 2 offers are as follows:

• Magento 2.0 uses the recent and popular versions of PHP, mainly 5.4 and 5.5, HTML5, CSS 3.3 and the latest versions of JQuery.
• The main JS library is JQuery.
• It needs JS module loader which enhances JS development
• CSS Processor (LESS)
• It is a Composer for easier and faster deployment, and for current technology Magento 2 uses PHP5.6. However, they also support the upgrades of PHP7.
• Different folder structure. It offers a different folder structure for all. Like the media folder, get.php, cron.php, and index.php file as moved into a pub folder. Also, the theme folder organization is changed now.
• The earlier versions of Magento needed technical knowledge for layout manipulations. However, the new version of Magento provides simplified customization so that even newbies can also use it.
• Magento 2 offers a component oriented module structure with the help of this feature; the merchants can obtain a possibility to enable, disable or replace the components as per their requirements, through a specially developed interface.
• It provides the modified directory structure so that the store management can make quicker. It reduces the number of root directories from 9 to 5.

 

Magento 2 Performance wise-

 

The Magento team has made a lot of efforts in making Magento 2.0 perform way better in almost every measurable aspect than its earlier version. Some of the significant performance upgrades of Magento 2 are as follows:

 

 

Full page caching-

Community and Enterprise editions of Magento include full page caching, which aids to cache category and product pages, as well as CMS pages. All pages cached versions are located in /var/page_cache folder and when a product gets added, edited or other changes are applied it get updates automatically. This new versions page load time performance boosts is an important one.

 

Optimized code- base-

The new release Magento 2 provides the optimized code base and the better quality code which is easy to maintain and also to upgrade.

 

Separating databases (Only enterprise edition)-

Magento 2.0 Enterprise brings a new feature which allows separate databases. Here, one database can hold the entire product, CMS and category information, whereas; the checkout process can handle by another database. To take care of order management the third instance, could be used.

 

Better extensions-

Magento has started to implement a strict review of all extensions. Here, with a number of test cases all the extensions have to submit so that the Magento can perform a full regression testing to confirm that the extension should not break any of the core functionality.

 

Out-of-the-box payments-

Magento 2 has come up with the amazing feature of out-of-the-box payments as there is no extension required now and the integration with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net payment gateways is now a part of Magento. It also integrates with WorldPay and CyberSource.

 

CSS preprocessing-

Magento 2.0 has come up with the inbuilt CSS preprocessor-LESS which makes life much easier for the front-end developers as the LESS extends CSS with variables, mixins, operations and nested rules.

 

Database optimization-

Magento 2.0 comes up with the database optimizations which address the problem of performance issues faced by the earlier version Magento 1 related to the table locking in the database when the site gets high traffic. The new version Magento 2 reduces the occurrences significantly.

 

Functionalities –

Magento 2 has come up with a lot of improved built-in functionality such as:

• 2-step check- out process viz. Shipping Address, Review & Payments
• The Out-of-the-box search functionality of the Magento is slightly improved with this new version i.e. Magento 2.
• CSS and JS minification process are better in Magento 2 than Magento 1.
• It also provides some improved functionalities with cache like,
• Redis and Varnish are built in now
• For both Community and Enterprise Edition the Full Page Cache (FPC) comes built in with Magento 2.

Is the Magento 2 worth moving from Magento 1?

Up till now we have seen the performance, functionalities and new features of Magento 2 which is getting improved than the earlier one i.e. Magento 1. All of this gives an edge to the Magento 2 over Magento 1. But still if you have any questions and doubts regarding the moving to Magento 2 from Magento 1 then let me give you some reasons so that you can decide it with more clarity.

 

1. Magento 2 has enhanced Performance & Scalability-

• Magento 2 gives you the speed which loads pages faster for home category and product pages. It nearly takes less than 1.5 seconds per page to load on the first view and even faster time when the pages will catch less than 0.75 seconds per page.
• It provides the checkout process for each step designed for page toll which is less than 1.9 seconds per step thus, you can convert more sale.
• It minimizes and bundles javascript, compresses the images and integrates varnish cache which helps for better site performance and provides a better shopping experience.
• Magento 2 supports the page views of 3.5 million per hour and more than 2,50,000 orders per hour, thus, aids to handle the busiest days of yours.

 

2. Magento 2 provides Rich User Experience –

• Magento 2 delivers a unique and engaging experience. With the support of the Magento 2 Page Builder, you can visually edit your site with ease and also can save lots of time, money and efforts.
• The Magento site makes shopping easier and with this shopper can easily narrow down their product options to find out which exactly they want.
• The checkout process of 2 step is fast which minimizes the steps and information they provide this, speeds up the shopper process. Here, the user can create/open another account with one click that too without even interrupting the transaction.

So, with all of this, doesn’t it seems like with Magento there is no going back. Here, there are two things, one if you are doing good and in no need to upgrade to the new version, i.e. Magento 2 as you do not have any plans to be a market leader or to compete in the market in your niche, then, you can use the earlier version only as they will be supporting the older versions for several years.

But if you have plans to conquer the competitive market out there to be a leader in your niche, and do not want to leave behind then you should upgrade with Magento 2. After all to be in competition, we have to adapt to the upcoming and advanced technology.

All the changes of the Magento are about opening the field of possibilities for both e-merchants and cart developers. Along with this, it also tries to improve the usability and understandability for the common user. So, let’s hope this new and advanced platform do well.