It’s taken a bit longer than 9 months, but Magento 2 is nearly here! Magento has done a fantastic job hitting all of the benchmarks and timelines it proposed at the beginning of 2015: Developer beta, then Merchant beta, and now General Availability.
Here at the Classy Llama Worldwide HQ, we’ve been fielding an increasing number of calls from merchants interested in learning more about Magento 2. I thought I would distill down what I’ve learned since Imagine 2015 and try to provide our merchant readers some useful information.
I Feel The Need, The Need for Speed.
So what is Magento 2? In one word, faster. There has been an intense focus on building Magento for better performance, especially for large multi-server clusters supporting enterprise users. It’s a complete rebuild of the Magento framework, with all of the lessons learned from 6+ years of software development incorporated into the architecture. Adding to the cart is 50% faster, check out times are 8-10% faster and out of the box Magento 2 can serve up to 200K page views and 50K orders per hour. Magento is requiring automated tests for all extensions distributed via Magento Connect, and are stressing quality throughout the codebase. It should be a good deal more stable, both within the Magento core and in any verified extensions from Connect. Magento extension vendor aheadWorks has a great blog post with more info on the technical details.
Not Sure If…
For merchants already on Magento, there’s always a question of when the next upgrade is coming. The responsive theme that shipped with Community Edition 1.9 and Enterprise Edition 1.14 has been a huge impetus for upgrades, especially in light ofMobilegeddon, Google’s mass shaming of sites that are not mobile-friendly. If your current Magento site is responsive, you can probably afford to wait a little longer to upgrade. If it isn’t responsive, please give us a call ASAP- we would love to build a new, responsive Magento 2 site for you!
The biggest strength of Magento is its ecosystem of partners and service providers, and there are over 100 of these available now for Magento 2, with more to come. There’s not yet 100% coverage though, so you won’t have as robust of a selection of third-party modules until (likely) mid-late 2016. We highly recommend planning a migration strategy with your service providers to ensure they are ready for your timeline.
If you’re a Magento Community Edition user and you’re starting to experience growing pains with site traffic and performance, Magento is rolling the full page cache and some of the improved database indexing from Enterprise 1.X into Community 2.0. If you’re at the point where you need multiple databases and web nodes, then you definitely want to take a look at Magento 2 Enterprise Edition – it’s designed specifically around this use case. A fast site is a happy site, happy sites make happy customers, and happy customers convert!
The bottom line is, if you are happy with your site performance and mobile experience – you may be able to wait until things calm down in mid 2016 before you upgrade to Magento 2.
We Can Rebuild… Magento!
On the other hand, if your current eCommerce platform is having performance issues or is not mobile-friendly, then Magento 2 is definitely a sooner-rather-than-later option. Why? Because not having a mobile friendly site hurts your SEO, and reaaallly sllooowwwww page load times annoy shoppers. Magento 2 now represents the quickest path to a truly responsive, scalable, feature-rich eCommerce platform. For those already on Magento 1.X and considering an upgrade, Magento has released a data conversion utility that will convert your catalog, customer, and order core data over fairly painlessly. You will definitely need to replace any custom code or non-core data, and it’s highly likely you will need a new theme built – but it’s not a ‘start-over-from-scratch’ proposition.
Llama Love
So why Classy Llama? Yep, we’re Gold Certified Magento partners. And yes, we only develop on Magento. But what makes us special when it comes to Magento 2? Didn’t you just say it’s a completely new framework built on new technology? I’m glad you asked! Or rather, I’m glad I asked on your behalf.
First off, we’re one of few agencies in the US who are already certified Magento 2 Trained Solution Partners. Additionally, our developers have been contributing to the Magento 2 codebase for several months. You can check out the Contributions page here – Classy Llama team members listed include David Alger, Erik Hansen, Eric Wiese, and Rob Tull. Outside of Magento’s own employees, our team has been one of the largest contributors of code to the new platform. We’ve devoted a ton of time to rebuilding our development environments, reading the docs, writing blog posts, and coding in Magento 2. It’s not scary, it’s not hard – it’s just different. We’re confident that if you need a Magento 2 site built, we’re the best ones to do it.
