Magento 2 For E-commerce Website Development

A truly successful e-commerce business, first and foremost, requires a reliable platform to be efficiently presented on the Internet. Nowadays, you can find hundreds of different systems on the market, and making the right choice is not an easy task. Not all platforms cope perfectly with various trading tasks.

 

Mostly, they provide a big number of restrictions critical for e-commerce, but when talking about Magento 2, there is no room for doubt. The Magento ecosystem can boast of all the necessary conditions and tools for doing a profitable business in the field of electronic commerce. Numerous world brands have made their choice in favor of Magento 2, and here is why.

 

The Top Reasons To Use Magento 2 For The E-commerce Development

 

To start with, Magento is the most popular e-commerce platform in the world, processing more than 155 billion US dollars of the total volume of goods sold annually on its platform. Its new version, Magento 2, is one of the most commonly used CMSs for developing online stores around the globe due to its powerful scalable architecture and advanced functionality:

 

• Magento 2 is compatible with the latest technologies, as PHP 7, which means fireball loading (compared to Magento 1 and other CMSs). Magento 2 can handle 10 million page views per hour.

 

• It’s a multi-store, multilingual system with a simple method to create additional sites using subdirectories and design options. The biggest plus is its ability to track all the stores from a single admin panel where you can manage various stores located in different locations without confusion and extra effort. This admin panel is extra convenient for customizing, creating products, navigating and filtering data.

 

• Magento 2 provides the best shopping process: easy ordering, user-friendly interface for UI/UX mobile devices, and improved search functionality.

 

• Magento 2 does not stick to the standard Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture. Instead, the platform offers a number of additional features and is extremely effective for adding new products and other elements. Scalability and modularity allow users to expand Magento according to their personal and business needs.

 

• Magento has a global community consisting of more than 300,000 developers and over 1,000 highly competent technology and solutions partners.

 

• Magento “is friends” with search systems. Each site owner strives to ensure his/her site takes a place within the first 10 search results. Magento has a specific ranking functionality making it much easier to index the website by search engines. For example, several options facilitate the way search robots read information from the site. This promotes the web page in search results, leading to increased traffic, and ultimately, to an increase in conversion.

 

• Excellent marketing tools are an integral part of the platform. Choosing Magento 2 as a CMS system for your E-commerce website, you get an impressive set of marketing tools at your disposal: coupons, pricing rules, unique product categories, separate pages for promotions, “Send to a Friend” links, polls, and many other effective marketing features.

 

Opportunities with Magento 2

 

Looking at the amazing opportunities the Magento ecosystem offers its users, you may ask why we focus on the second version of Magento, without mentioning its predecessor, Magento 1. The answer is modernization and constant development. Technology doesn’t stand still, and anyone keeping up with changes knows firsthand about success.

 

In fact, Magento 1 is a good old software that brought a great number of outstanding results and achievements to its users, but the key word here is “old.” E-commerce is about innovation and modernity; sooner or later you have to move your site from the first version of Magento to the newest Magento 2 platform. Believe us, the cool improvements of Magento 2 will not make you regret this choice. See for yourself!

 

 

Magento 1 and Magento 2

 

 

The main reason for thinking about migration to Magento 2 is Magento 1 has ceased to be the focus of Magento, Inc. Its support will be ended this year, and the users can only rely on assistance in fixing critical errors and solving security problems. Additionally, Magento, Inc. will no longer invest in the development of Magento 1 nor will it expand its functionality or implement any advanced technical solutions.

 

At the same time, Magento 2 is regularly developing and improving, and delights users with these advantages (in comparison with Magento 1):

 

• The innovative architecture of Magento 2 makes its high-quality 45 modules more compatible with each other and with the core. This reduces the likelihood of a store crash when installing a new module. An administrator now has more opportunities to smoothly build up and upgrade his store with new modules with less risk of breaking down already working components.

 

• Magento 2 supports plug-ins 54 which allows you to not overlap the entire class but to perform micro-actions point-by-point before, after and around the execution of some kernel method. This is a giant step forward; there are no other systems on the market possessing this technology.

 

• Magento 2 has an open development process and uses GitHub as a public development site, where it’s easy to report a defect. The support team responds quickly and efficiently.

 

Magento 1 is an open source system, but the development process is slow and closed from partners.

 

• Increased speed of work both on the administrator’s side and on the client’s side.

 

• Increased usability of both administrator and client zones.

 

• An updated stack of used technologies.

 

• A full page caching in both the Community version and the Enterprise version.

 

• Improved ordering processes.

 

• The code is completely covered with automatic tests.

 

A few startling figures:

 

• Magento 2 is 25% faster for the end user; the addition of goods to the shopping cart occurs as much as 52% faster than it did on the Magento 1.x platform.

 

• Magento 2 is capable of displaying up to 10 million catalog pages per hour versus 500,000 pages per hour for versions of Magento CE 1.9.x or Magento EE 1.14.x.

 

• Magento 2 is capable of accepting 117% more orders per hour.

 

(The data are taken from these sources:
https://www.customerparadigm.com/magento-development/upgrade/magento-upgrade-2-0/
https://magentoseotips.blogspot.com/2018/07/why-magento-2-should-be-your-next-update.html)

 

Taking into account the information provided, the migration of online stores to the Magento 2 platform is just a matter of time. Since the migration process is quite complex and includes a number of nuances, you need to approach this procedure seriously.

 

 

Things You Should Know Before Migrating To Magento 2

 

Platforms Magento 1.x and Magento 2.x are incompatible. This means if you have Magento version 1.x, its modules and the current theme cannot be used in Magento 2. The situation with the data is somewhat better because there is an official utility making it easier for developers to transfer them. However, this tool allows you to transfer only the data that were in Magento initially, but not data from third-party modules.

 

As you can see, the process of migration to Magento 2 is more like the creation of a new store (site) using the available data, rather than a usual upgrade to the latest version.

 

Before migrating, we recommend that you answer the following questions:

 

• What Magento 1.x modules are used on your site at the moment?

 

• Which of the modules used are compatible with Magento 2? (this information can be requested from the module developers).

 

• Does your current hosting service meet the requirements for Magento 2? (requirements are available by the external link).

 

Consideration of the migration time is one of the key requirements for a successful movement to a new platform. For small E-commerce websites, this factor does not play as an important a role as for large projects, when the migration process can take from several hours to several days. You do not need to go offline for a long time. The longest stage of migration is the process of creating a backup copy of the database. After that, it is necessary to include a balancing phase which in turn requires the introduction of the offline phase.

 

It is important to impose restrictions on operations that should not be carried out during the migration period. For example, you can keep the possibility of placing orders on the site, while prohibiting any actions to change orders by the administration. The main step is the export and import of content to the Magento 2 database. The current structure of Magento 2 allows you to perform direct data transfer from one database to another.

 

 

Migration Process To Magento 2

 

Generally, the migration process to Magento 2 can be presented through this scheme:

 

• Create the database triggers required to commit changes to the table.
• Back up your data.
• Do not make any changes and take your site offline
• Correct the data spent on copying during the migration time, making appropriate changes to the created copy of the database.
• Remove all triggers from the old database.
• Launch your new Magento 2 site with Top Magento Developers

 

 

If everything is done correctly, in accordance with this plan, eventually, you can see your new working store based on Magento 2, launched in a reasonable period of time. Now, you have a basic understanding of what Magento 2 is and how it differs from the first version, why many e-commerce businesses choose it for their online stores, and what benefits you get by migrating your website to this new platform. Take only bold decisions!