The wait ended for Magento lovers when Magento 2.3, the latest addition to the Magento 2 series, was made public. The all-new version of Magento brings along with it a bucket-load of new features which promises to fill up the gaps and enhance its performance abilities. Sounds awesome!!!
A quick answer to what’s new in Magento 2.3 would be, performance, security, and innovation. It is not that these three were absent in the previous version but were not as powerful as it claims to be now.
With every new update, Magento eCommerce developers wish for an even faster, safer and better way of developing things and looking at the new features of Magento 2.3, we can say it will meet up their expectations as this release has a pocket-full of numerous functional fixes, performance enhancements and quite a load of security updates. Enough of the suspense now, here’s what Magento 2.3 has to offer.
For Performance
Magento 2.3 has added the following features that will not only increase the performance level but will also lessen the burden on the server, thereby delivering resources faster than ever before.
- It now supports the latest version of PHP 7.2 due to which you will get higher security, better performance, and a lot of many new development features.
- Magento 2 store owners can rejoice as all new encryption and decryption will now be handled by the sodium library in it which will remove the PHP encryption module ‘mcrypt’ and migrate to Libsodium for password hashing.
- GraphQL, the query language for using APIs has been introduced in Magento 2.3 as an alternative API in addition to REST and SOAP web APIs for custom frontend development, including headless storefronts and PWAs. This will benefit greatly in getting more refined data with fewer API requests.
- Traditionally, the waiting period of the response to the request made by the client takes quite a long and if it is in a huge amount the more time it will consume but in Magento 2.3, with Asynchronous APIs, the processing period becomes faster and better. Moreover, there is now a separate status reporting API in it which will help in checking the status of each request by ID. The good news is that this functionality will be now available in both Magento Commerce 2.3 and Magento Open Source.
- Earlier limited to only Magento commerce, Message Queue is now made available in Magento 2.3.0. It enables asynchronous communication between systems. The messages/tasks in it are published into a queue and the sender needs no immediate response to continuing processing. In short, it eases the strain on the application band enhances the performance of your Magento store.
- One feature that will save a lot of time, energy, and resources for developers is Declarative Database Schema. This will free them from the headache of creating a series of database scripts to make any changes in the tables. They can now create, update, and delete tables directly via XML.
Talk about security
- The admins of Magento store owners can now relax as no malicious thing will attempt to lurk into your panel anymore as Magento 2.3 now has the Two Factor Authentication feature in it. This additional layer of security won’t allow anyone to log in until the attempt is verified via SMS, Phone call, Access Token, or One Touch. Google Authenticator, Duo Security, Authy, U2F Devices (Yubikey and others) are the authentication methods that support this service.
- Since we have bots today to ensure the users are human only, Magento store owners can now have the security of Google reCAPTCHA on their Magento mobile app. It is a free service provided by Google that filters and restricts spambots from flooding your Magento store with junk and protects various important features of app or website like the login, register, contact forms, admin login etc. from getting any non-human traffic into it.
- Cache management is an important aspect and the latest update of Magento 2 series has got you covered. Its cache management ACL provides fine-grained admin control through which you assign access to view and delete your store caches and thus prevent any kind of accidental changes from affecting the performance of your Magento store.
Other goodies
- Multi-Source Inventory (MSI), can be described as the best upgrade in Magento 2.3 as it gives the Magento website and mobile app store owners an ability to manage their physical inventory via multiple sources directly from the admin panel. The merchants can ship and keep track of inventory at every location, check its quantity etc., using MSI.
- To power-up the experience of developers, PWA studio has been added into Magento 2.3. Progressive Web Applications are such apps that built to take advantage of modern technology features that “progressively” scales back on devices who lack them. With the help of PWA Studio, your developers can create reliable, fast, and engaging apps on the Magento platform that will run in offline mode, support data caching and increase your conversion rates.
- Customization is what every store owner love and Page Builder does it. Page Builder is an easy to use drag-and-drop visual content editing tool through which merchants can customise the look and feel of their store as they like without the need for any technical expertise. Plus, you can get Third Party Content Integration, including the likes of YouTube, Vimeo Videos, Google Maps and much more done as well.
- Elastic Search support which was only available to Magento Commerce has been now extended to Magento Open Source with this latest update. It will power up your Magento’s site search capabilities, including faceted search (filtering by attributes).
Conclusion
Magento is already doing wonders in e-commerce and with its every update it gives something more. Hence, it’s time to dump the age-old version of Magento and get on to Magento 2.3. Just note that before migrating to the new home, give a check whether your already running Magento extension or 3rd-party solutions are able to afford Magento 2.3 or not as it has some remarkable features that may impact their functionality. So, seek the help of an experienced Magento eCommerce Solution builder who can implement the magic of Magento 2.3 into your store and go attract your customers.