Magento 2.3 – Accelerate Your Store’s Growth in 2019

First heard of at Imagine 2018, Las Vegas, Magento 2.3, is finally here, and is already making waves for obvious reasons. And guess what, while 2018 was by all means a good year for Magento store owners, 2019 could be even better. More so because the latest release, with a plethora of new features, looks quite promising, to say the least, and is expected to make up for the gaps; not that we were complaining. Now, before you get all you worked up, and go ahead and install Magento right away, it’s imperative for you to be in the know, and find out what all is in the offing.

You can now expect a far better performance (yay!)

• Price Indexer: For starters, complex sites and those with multiple price books, which were earlier more of a tough nut to crack, can now easily be dealt with, using what’s being called a “scoped and multithreaded” price indexer. Designed to help improve layered navigation, the indexer could also play an important role in making the search and indexing actions relatively easy.
• Store Locale: On a completely different note, you are no longer required to tread a difficult path and compulsorily export and import configuration data, if and when you feel the need to change the store locale. Thanks to Magento’s environment variable SCD_ON_DEMAND, you can now do it with utter ease.
• Mixins: Magento has also made it a point to edit its UI mixins so as to improve performance, while at the same time ensuring that the JavaScript mixins-enabled Swatch functionality lives up to your expectations, and doesn’t give you a hard time with regard to Safari and Microsoft Edge.
• Mass Update: And talking of performance, did we tell you that you are now at the liberty to perform mass update on products having over 60 attributes? If not for anything else, do it for this very reason – make Magento 2.3 a part of your action plan for the coming year, like already!
• Catalog Rule Re-Index: Last, but not least, all you B2C store owners out there can heave a sigh of relief. While you earlier had to make do with a prolonged catalog rule re-index operation, which went on for more than 20 minutes at times, you can now experience a considerable improvement, with Magento optimizing the said operation, and reducing the time by up to 80%.

Your development woes have been taken care of (well, almost!)

• • PWAs: While you could earlier only go for custom Magento development to take full advantage of the platform, you can now take it up a notch. The latest release also lets you get your hands on Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) that run in the offline mode, support data caching, and more importantly, give your conversion rate the much-needed push. And that’s because Magento 2.3 brings PWA studio to the table, making it rather easy to develop,deploy, and maintain such apps.

• GraphQL: And while we are discussing PWAs, you should know that Magento’s latest version also brings along GraphQL, an API that’s being seen as an alternate of sorts. The word is that it can be used in place of REST and SOAP web APIs, and is aimed at making custom frontend development easier. Also, if you have been struggling with API requests or the ever-increasing number thereof, this one would make sure that there are fewer to be dealt with, while giving you access to more refined data for headless storefronts and PWAs.
• Declarative Schema: Another feature that’ll help you with the development process is the introduction of Declarative Schema. While at first, it may not seem to have a direct bearing on how you develop a Magento store or an app for that matter, it can, for sure, simplify the installation and upgrade procedures for the platform as a whole and not to forget, its extensions, eliminating the need to maintain database scripts, and extending the coveted ability to create, update, and delete tables directly via XML, eventually lowering the development-related complexities otherwise involved.

You no longer have to worry about security (phew!)

• • Two-Factor Authentication: As a Magento store admin, you may have faced this untoward incident at some point or the other, we all have, wherein someone or something attempts to lurk into the panel, breaching the security. Not any more. Anyone who tries to log in, would now need to wait for verification. Well, don’t thank us; thank Magento 2.3’s two-factor authentication.
  • Controlled Cache Management: If you have never had accidental changes taking a toll on the performance of your Magento store, trust us, you are among the lucky ones. Because some of us have been there, done that. Coming back to the accidental changes, Magento has decided to make room for cache management, offering a fine-grained admin control, thereby enabling you to assign access to view and delete your store caches, and keep the said changes at bay.

You are in for a treat (surprise!)

• • • Gift Cards: Oddly enough, gift cards, which by all means, have been an integral part of eCommerce, are not being discussed, even though Magento has made it a point to discuss these in detail, and rightly so. On that note, while users weren’t earlier required to designate an amount before they could save a new gift card, they’ll now have to key in the required values first. A little discouraging maybe, but the fact that Magento now establishes a relationship between new gift card accounts if a user buyers multiple gift cards in the same order more or less makes up for it.
    • Tax: Moving on to yet another feature, tax, redundant calculations are now a thing of the past. More often than not, doing calculations for every price on the category page used to affect the overall performance, and how. So, it’s a relief that Magento has decided to do away with these for good. Also, while earlier the use of specific tax configurations resulted in Magento displaying the wrong order tax amounts, this too, has been fixed.

Features galore. And so do the opportunities.

Magento already has a lot to offer, and the latest release is yet another reason for you to take to it, and grab your share of the eCommerce pie. And if you don’t know how to, well, worry not, we at SunTec India, can help you make the most of it. Reach out to us at info@suntecindia.com, and we will make sure that Magento 2.3 gets you the results that you’d expect to achieve from your action plan 2019.