Magento 2 Improvements over Magento 1

Magento is one of the top leading Open-Source Digital Commerce Platform for an online store. Magento is used by both small scale industries and large scale industries to open their online store and handle their store. Magento is the best Content Management System(CMS) to develop an ecommerce website and manage their store. Magento is getting improved day by day, because of the hard work and high level analysis of magento team and thousands of developers who are showing their interest in it and developing more functional & innovative extensions and themes to make magento more easy to use.

Now, magento has released a complete new version which they named as Magento 2. Magento 2 is totally different from magento in terms of new features, structure flow, coding, view and many more. In magento 2, team has tried to improve all the complaints of developers who are facing issues in magento previous version. The Key features that are improved in magento 2 are:

Improved Performance:

Performance was the major issue which a developer faces when it comes time to deploy a heavy ecommerce website using magento. Because the performance of magento (till 1.9.x) was slow. But in Magento 2 they have worked a lot in it and improved the performance of Magento 2 by an average of 20%. Additions on Magento 2:

• Magento 2 fully supports PHP 5.6 and PHP 7. PHP 7 is now released with completely new performance and much faster executions.
• Nginx has been developed with three core principles in mind: high performance, high concurrency, and low usage of memory. Thus, it significantly increases the speed, and Magento 2 will fully support it.
• Redis is an advanced key-value cache which provides top notch performance and offers other features. It incorporates several use cases for in-memory datasets, which are the reason of high performance results.
• Full page caching is so powerful due to the ability to store the full page output in a cache. As a result, subsequent page loads do not require much server load. Thus, full page caching is mandatory for high-traffic websites, and Magento 2 will fully support it.

User-friendly Checkout:

Checkout is one of the most important part of an ecommerce website. If the checkout process is not good then the stores have more chances to move their products to abandon cart which reduces the store’s sales. Instead of an accordion layout that’s used in older versions of Magento, the steps are now located across the top. The overall design is much clearer and concise, and easier to navigate through. Customers need to have a stress-free and efficient checkout experience, and Magento 2 provides just that.

• Reduced the number of checkout steps and also reduce the information details to be filled by customers.
• Integration with popular payment gateways (PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, WorldPay (Enterprise Edition), CyberSource (Enterprise Edition)) that weren’t previously supported. Variety of payment options provide better checkout UX for your customers.
• Automatic guest checkout.
• Order summary with thumbnail.
• Receiving shipping rates once information is provided.

User-friendly Administration Panel:

The main administration panel has been redesigned and is now displayed vertically on the left hand side of the admin. The menu icons are very prominent and this is because the entire navigation is touch friendly and responsive. This improvement should be welcomed and should definitely help those merchants who spend their days running around with an iPad in hand. Changes in administration panel are:

• UI enhancements providing responsive and touch friendly navigation. Let the good times roll for merchants who works with CMS via iPads or tablet.
• Features are well categorised and managed under the menu in comparison to previous magento version.
• Grid view is made configurable, so that admin can select the attributes to be shown in it. Before, we need to hard to add any new column in grid.