The quick guide: Why upgrade to Magento 2?

In today’s new media age, the e-commerce industry has revolutionized the way customers shop, sitting in the comfort of their homes. On top of this, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of digital commerce business experience for merchants.

In the current evolving commerce landscape, Magento is considered to be one of the most compelling and popular e-commerce platforms. That is why Magento frequently upgrades its platform for both performance and security reasons. At the beginning of the year 2021, it has come with its new release – Magento Commerce and Open Source 2.4.2.

The new release of Magento focuses on delivering more opportunities to B2B and B2C store owners. Magento 2.4.2 comes with a long list of new features, bug fixes, code fixes, test cycles and security enhancements. In this blog post, we will walk you through upgrade services in the latest version Magento 2.4.2 and best way to upgrade Magento.

But let us first see why it is the right time to upgrade to Magento 2.4.2.

Why do you need Magento 2.4.2 upgrade?

By upgrading to Magento 2.4.2, you can leverage the latest technology and provide a better customer experience to the shoppers. It will help you to accelerate your digital commerce business and open up new avenues. The latest Magento 2.4.2 release un-boxes new functions and substantial benefits such as:

• Better purchase approvals
• Faster time-to-market
• Improved storefront performance
• Boosted API performance
• Faster admin response time
• Improved default search engine
• Support for remote storage solutions

Getting familiar with the new feature updates in Magneto 2.4.2

The new release mainly focuses on security updates and includes over 280 new fixes to core code. It includes the resolution of around 290 GitHub issues by our community members. Let us see the new features and upgrades provided by Magento in the release of Magento 2.4.2.

Platform advancements

The latest version release of Magento includes numerous upgrades to the Magento platform’s performance, quality and security. The new version of the platform may need you to migrate to Composer 2.x. Other platform enhancements in Magento 2 upgrade include:

• Support of elastic search 7.9.x
• Enhanced support for Varnish 6.4
• Support of Redis 6.x
• Enhanced support for PHPUnit 9.x
• Introduction of PHP 7.4 support
• Support of MariaDB 10.4.

Infrastructure enrichments

The new version of Magento commerce can address several infrastructure challenges of an online store. For instance, it will allow shoppers to clear the entire shopping cart with a single click. It makes the store infrastructure become faster and make it more resistant to high loads. The new release mainly includes improvements to the framework’s core quality and the following functional areas:

• Customer Account
• Catalog
• CMS
• OMS
• Import/export
• Promotions
• Targeting
• Cart and checkout
• Staging and preview

Security developments

Magento 2.4.2 upgrade delivers more than 35 security bug fixes and developments, including the following upgrades:

• Support of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
• Core cookies support the SameSite attribute
• Improved file systems’ operation
• Support for Remote Code Execution (RCE)
• Fixed the core content security policy (CSP) violations

Most of the issues in security require access to the admin panel of the store. So, you must safeguard it with solutions that you are familiar with, such as usage of unique admin URL, strong password, IP whistling, 2FS, etc.

B2B commerce updates

The new Magento 2.4 upgrade release brings some long-awaited feature updates and bug fixes in the B2B functionality of the platform. It introduces Magento B2B version 1.3.1, which further introduces the new feature – online payment methods for purchase orders. It allows users to pay online from anywhere, anytime. There are multiple other bug fixes and improvements for the B2B e-commerce merchants, including:

• Support for custom email templates about payment details
• Compatible with third-party or custom made payment methods
• Maintains PCI compliance for existing payment method templates
• Improvements in GitHub-302, GitHub-259 and GitHub-213
• Added an option to change the payment method in the last payment step
• Addition of the ‘Approved/Pending’ payment status for purchase orders

Enhancements in partner’s ecosystem

Magento 2.4.2 offers the following enhancements for vendor-developed extensions or third-party extensions:

Braintree: It has now added the support for multi-address shipping.

Amazon Pay: The new release has deprecated the option to pay via Amazon Pay.

Vertex: It has deprecated code removal and offers an improved admin experience and backend interface.

dotdigital: The engagement cloud model of this partner now supports diagnostic alerts and Page Builder.

Yotpo: It has witnessed improvement in the order synchronization mechanism.

Klarna: It now utilizes a GraphQL module that supports PWA integrations.

Enhancements in tools and integrations

The new release of the Magento platform offers the following tools and integrations enhancements:

PWO studio: It offers improved localization and internationalization, multiple payments and language support, better extensibility, etc.

GraphQL: It includes support for unions, multiple wish lists, RMA, comparison lists, and much more.

Media gallery: It offers new role resources functionality to restrict unauthorized admin access. Merchants can also use web-optimized images in the content.

Page Builder: It includes an improved Page Builder CSS customization and Page Builder content creation. The new release also offers an improved inline experience.

AWS S3: Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3) enhancements include support for object storage and future extensibility. It also enables storing media files on it.

Capture new opportunities!

It is always a good move to upgrade Magento version 2.3.X to 2.4.2 or upgrade Magento 2.4.1 to 2.4.2. Are you still perplexed whether to upgrade to Magento 2.4.2 or not? Or do you need a strategic partner to assist you in leveraging the latest Magento platform from the ground up? You can get in touch with our Magento developers for all such queries and get started on the upgrade process at the earliest opportunity!