What’s New in Magento 2.0?

Magento is the most popular enterprise e-commerce software available and for good reasons. Earlier this year, the long awaited Magento version 2.0 became available. More than a Facelift, 2.0 represents an architectural overhaul that will provide a more powerful and reliable platform for your commerce store and a better shopping experience for your customers.

The Brainstorm team was fortunate to get advanced access to 2.0. After months of testing and deploying several websites, we are thrilled with the update, and here’s our review:

Magento 2.0 is Faster:With "page caching," the web server no longer has to perform slow database queries to render a page. The system now builds pages much more efficiently for load times of 1-2 seconds. This will provide a better user experience and better SEO rankings.

Checkout Process Is Easier and Faster:It’s a fact that anything you can do to improve the usability and speed of the checkout process will reduce shopping cart abandonment. Now with Magento 2.0, one-page checkout is the default – a big improvement over the the cumbersome process in previous versions. Guest checkout is assumed and users can choose to create an account with one-click.

Cleaner Code:Stricter standards mean that there is no easy way to leave non-optimized code in place on 2.0 sites. This means a leaner site, faster load time and easier crawling by search engines.

Better Performance for Larger Sites:Before 2.0, an issue called "table locking" locked the system when large amounts of simultaneous transactions were taking place. Some new and highly esoteric caching and table optimization now prevents this from happening.

User-friendly Admin Area: The new admin interface has been carefully designed to help admins save time managing products, orders and customer data. The admin panel can now be personalized to allow easy access the information you feel is most important. Plus, the previously painful product import is now 4x faster.

Additional Features:
advanced customer segmentation, personalization, improved PCI compliance, gift registry and more. All of these features which required extensions in the past version are now available right out of the box.

Why People May Not Adopt:
Updating in the short term might be difficult for companies who have done advanced customization on a previous version of Magento, or spent a lot of time and money on a recent build. We can stress that the gains of working with 2.0 are worth the tradeoff, but plan for extra time in your project timeline as this is a completely new platform.

Contact a Brainstorm Magento specialist today for more information: Contact Now

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