How Magento 2.0 Is Giving Retailers New Hope

Posted on the 22nd March 2016

Magento 2.0 has been out for a while now, and it is offering brand owners, retailers and businesses the chance to deliver fast and cost-effective omni-channel shopping experiences for their customers. When Magento 2.0 was first released, many retailers were reluctant to make the leap from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.0, because of concerns about extension compatibility, themes, and the lack of certain features.

Now that the platform is established, however, many store owners are finding that it does indeed have several advantages over the older version of the platform – and indeed rival platforms.

Firstly, it offers rapid and cost-effective development. It is easy to use templates, widgets, modules and add-ons to expand your site’s features.

It also includes some great out-of-the-box SEO features, which can help to ensure that your site ranks as well as possible in the SERPS. Organic traffic is a boon for any ecommerce website, since the long tail of searches offers the potential to attract visitors who have strong purchase intent.

In addition, the user base for Magento 2.0 is growing rapidly, and this means the developer base is too. As a result, the software benefits from a wide range of on-going bug fixes, upgrades, new features, and performance enhancements.

For larger store owners, Magento 2.0 offers the ability to maintain separate databases; one for the content, for example, and one for customers and transactions. This means that you can ensure that website performance is not compromised even under high traffic loads, ensuring that customers who are trying to make a purchase will have a smooth experience, even if some elements of the site are a little slower. This feature is aimed at owners of websites that see 5,000 or more orders per day, and it offers substantial performance improvements.

Data backups have been improved too. You can now automate backups, put your site in maintenance mode while you are restoring a backup (to ensure that the backup process completes smoothly), and restore large volumes of data quickly and easily. With Developer Mode, Production Mode and Default Mode for managing the website and error log reporting, webmasters have far more control than they did before.

The older versions of Magento are still supported, but that is not going to remain the case forever. Upgrading now is a good idea if you want to ensure that your site remains safe and secure.