Enhance Website’s Performance with Fascinating Features of Magento 2.4

With an increase in the pace of Magento’s usage, Magento has to upgrade its features and meet customers’ requirements continuously. No pandemic can stop Magento developers from enhancing the platform.

There are various reasons for enhancing any platform, such as retaining the existing customers by fixing bugs, meeting the customer’s expectations, attracting new customers with fascinating features, and making the platform more robust, protecting from cyber-attacks.

Magento never fails to add new substantial features that can indeed benefit both merchants and customers and have fixed many bugs existing in the previous ones. Magento 2.4 version is released on 28th July 2020.

With each version, Magento has focused on enhancing the platform in various aspects that can indeed retain the existing customers and acquire new customers.

Below is the List of Features Provided by Magento 2.4:

1. In-Store Pickup:

It is a very convenient way of shopping, making it flexible for the customers to order anything from anywhere and pick up their orders from the nearest store of their choice without incurring any additional shipping cost. 

Often, buyers come across a situation where the shipping cost exceeds the product they are looking for, leading to cart abandonment. To eliminate such scenarios, the concept of In-Store pickup is introduced.

With Magento 2.4, Merchants has been offered the control of deciding which physical inventory stores should be displayed as customer pickup points. And on the other hand, customers can quickly find the nearest pickup point of their choice during the checkout. 

Merchants can modify the stores with ease because of their flexible configurations.

2. Improved Media Gallery:

Magento Developers have entirely redeveloped the Media Gallery making it easier and quicker for the customers to manage. The customers can search and filter images faster as compared to the previous version.

In fact, Magento has stated that it has increased performance up to 30x. They can also manage the images efficiently by knowing where and how often those images can be reused. 

With Magento 2.4, the media gallery is integrated with Adobe Stock, letting the customers access the stock images preview from the media gallery itself to save a lot of time.

3. Customers aided Shopping:

Merchants can help the customers throughout the shopping process making it more customized and flexible for buyers. Basically, the customer service team can log in to the website to eliminate the need of customers asking the merchants for the issues that they are facing.

They can help customers with various features such as how to smartly plan strategies boosting to more conversions, i.e., support them in setting up the wishlist, placing orders, and creating quotes on their behalf, saving their time.

Henceforth, the merchants will have full control over the customer’s website and help them troubleshoot any of the issues they are facing.

This is one of the most helpful features since the customers might need help from merchants in various areas, and without any hassle, merchants can help them.

All sessions are destroyed, following the merchants’ logout, and hence, they can not access the customers’ password. 

4. Purchase Approval Workflow:

This is one of the highlighting features that has been introduced in Magento 2.4. This feature facilitates customers to give importance to individual approval by setting up a form. They can set up their own rules based on various aspects.

For example, suppose the buyer buys more than ten quantities of a single product. In that case, the approval should be done by a higher manager. This can be easily set up using this feature. A flow can be set up consisting of some predefined rules. Therefore, the concerned people will be notified of the approval. 

They can either approve, reject, or add a comment on a purchase order.

5. Faster search:

Search is an essential feature in any eCommerce business. It is one of the most used features by the customers. Hence, it is crucial to optimize it as much as we can. Faster searches will lead to more conversions and repeated purchases.

Ideally, a customer won’t wait for more than 30 seconds if the search results are not up, and will look for alternative solutions on the Internet. With Magento 2.4, merchants have to install elastic search on the server.

Elasticsearch, being one of the fastest search engines, is used in Magento, giving the results to the customers much faster.

6. Other Enhancements:

Caching of the SQL Queries for the inventory table has been improved. Also, significant optimizations have been done to enhance the performance of Redis. With Magento 2.4, third party payments have been removed, and everyone has to install/upgrade Magento only through the command line.

Two-factor authentication is mandatory for all the merchants, making it more robust. A composer update plugin can eliminate the humans’ need, thereby automating several time-consuming actions that were earlier done manually.

PWA’s have been enhanced by introducing a new Venia storefront, making it easier for the merchants and the customers to adapt to this PWA. Improvements have also been made to support headless eCommerce, i.e., the store will work as expected on all the digital channels.

Many bugs have been fixed with this latest version, improving the quality of various features. 

With Magento 2.4, many significant platform improvements have been made that are listed as below:

Platform Upgrades:

• Support for PHP 7.4, eliminating the need for 7.1 and 7.2. Magento Extension providers have to make sure that all the extensions are compatible with PHP 7.4
• Support for PHP unit 9.x, cutting down PHP unit 6.5 and ensuring all the tests have been configured to run with PHP unit 9.
• MYSQL search engine has been removed, and Elasticsearch 7.6x is the default search engine. All of them have to install an elastic search on the server, boosting the search process. Elasticsearch provides excellent search capabilities and catalog performance optimizations.
• Support for MYSQL 8 has been introduced, and 5.6 is no longer supported.
• Support for MariaDB 10.4. Merchants are advised to upgrade to this version to improve the performance and reliability of the website.
• The need for the Zend framework has been put to an end and has migrated to Laminas Project.
• The core braintree module has been knocked out.
• Removal of Signifyd fraud protection code.
• Internet Explorer 11.x browser is no longer supported.

Increased Performance:

• Caching for SQL has been improved, decreasing the threshold of using sixteen queries to the inventory stock sales channel to one.
• The performance in terms of orders has been improved by up to 30%.
• Magento 2.4 has enhanced the features ensuring that the merchant’s website will always run at peak efficiency.
• Multiple optimizations to Redis such as decreasing the size of data transfer between Redis and Magento, reducing the CPU cycles consumed by Redis, and many more.

Significant Security Improvements: 

• Two-factor authentication is mandatory now for all the merchants. It is activated by default and can not be disabled. 
• With Magento 2.4, template filter strict mode is enabled by default.
• Earlier, we came across situations where unauthorized users have tried to execute javascript files. To avoid such cases, the developers have disabled data rendering for UI providers.
• The concept of security.txt file has been introduced with this version to handle security-related issues.
• Focused on the improvement of content security policy.
• More than 30+ bugs existing previously have been removed, along with the focus on securing cloud SSH access.

Enhanced Infrastructure:

• Considering search as one of the essential features of the eCommerce business, this version has further enhanced the search feature by introducing partial word search with the help of elasticsearch.
• Merchants no longer have to rely on third-party payment methods.
• With the cutting-edge technologies, Magento has always tried to automate the features, thereby reducing human involvement, saving their time that can be invested in other vital areas.
• One of the best features incorporated in this version is that merchants can log in to their customers’ websites and help them plan and suggest ideas to attract more customers.
• Migration of PayPal express checkout integration to the latest PayPal JavaScript SDK that will automatically collect and pass needed risk parameters to PayPal.

Wrapping up!!

Being one of the most promising eCommerce platforms, Magento is back with an exciting newer version containing a bunch of new fascinating features. This version will surely provide the merchants with the capability to grab new opportunities and grow their business in this competitive environment.

Magento 2.4 has adapted all the latest technologies to make this platform as stable as possible and have upgraded existing features to meet all merchants and their customers’ requirements, enhancing the relationship between them and building trust.

Indeed, Magento 2.4 is full of surprises for your website. Why not use all these fascinating features and see the trend of sales going upwards? Magento will never let you regret your decisions.