Ever since the release of Magento 2 on November 17th of 2015, more and more companies and owners of smaller businesses have started using it instead of Magento 1. There are many advantages that this upgraded version has when compared to the first release. However, not so many people actually know what the main differences between those two would be.
The thing that may add to the confusion, Magento 1 and 2 are not only versions of Magento. There are also Enterprise Editions, although they will not be the main focus in this article. Instead, we will talk about Magento 1 and Magento 2 functions, features, and their advantages and disadvantages.
What Is Magento?
Magento was launched on March 31st of 2008. It is an open-source eCommerce platform. It has outstanding features and makes online shopping easier and for shop owners to do almost everything like in a physical store. Magento 1 has quickly dominated the market with a round of 26 recent market share in 2014. It had some problems related to dealing with the installation of additional applications and has frequently encountered some bugs, which is why it was upgraded to version 2.0 in 2015.
That made the whole process much more manageable. Magento 2 was created to assist merchants to achieve their goals even easier. It has allowed them to set up online sales websites. The technology of Magento 2 was, compared to the previous version, upgraded as well. It has improved the platform’s interface and supports the mobile version alongside the structure, architecture, and directory structure of Magento.
The Difference
The overall performance of any eCommerce store is determining the growth of the actual business as well. With better performance, more traffic is possible, and thus the only thing remaining are solutions that can deal with the increased visitor demands. Magento 2 is, in general, faster all around and has an excellent frontend performance. Professionals at https://www.envisagedigital.co.uk/ would say: “Whether you’re a small business or an established brand, getting the most out of your Magento environment is crucial.” That is why it is also essential to compare Magento 1 and 2 and see what each offers. Magento 2, compared to the first version, loads pages from 30 to 50 percent faster. As a result, it can handle up to 39 percent more orders within one hour.
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Another great thing is that it can handle 10 million views within an hour while, on the other hand, Magento 1 can only deal with 200 thousand. Even if it has some significant improvements, it is still needed to optimize your store performance proactively. The quality of Magento hosting can significantly impact the store’s overall performance, which is another thing to have in mind. The performance may suffer even if the new technologies can help a bit.
Magento 1
Magento 1 was built in 2009 by using the technology that was available then. Magento supported this version until June of 2020, and the updates and security patches releases have been stopped. That also applies to the fixes. That can be inconvenient, to say the least. On the other hand, Magento 2 is quite the opposite.
Now it can support all recent online and eCommerce business innovations. It has a lean application footprint, and voice search, performance, and speed improvements have been made. Page builder has been introduced by the developers and advanced reporting, code automation, extended cache support, and PWA integration.
Magento 2
One of the main issues that Magento 1 has had is its performance. Magento 2 has significantly improved it. Multiple new technologies have changed the stack of Magento. Those would be achieved by the support of the more recent versions of Composer, Apache, MySQL, NGINX, PHP, CLI, Symphony, and the default support of Redis, Memcached, and Varnish.
It is vital to have in mind that Magento 2 supports the latest version of PHP. The reason would be better code performance. Magento 2 also reduces access to browser operations that clients may have. It achieves this through JavaScript and the default support for KnockoutJS and RequireJS in its core codebase.
Since 2008 a lot has changed. Brick and mortar stores can be closed any minute due to the COVID pandemic. Online shopping, education, and pretty much everything else brought Magento to the center of business attention. Given how many people are turning online and how much time they spend in online stores, there is little doubt that speed, reliability, and the capabilities to handle large volumes of traffic are critical.
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