Magento is nowadays one of the leaders in the world of e-commerce for setting an online store and running it. Magento offers plenty of great features and extensions to raise the usability of your website, and to enhance the shopping experience of your consumers. As you may know in 2015 Magento has released the updates to both of its versions (Magento Community Edition 1.9.2 and Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2). Let us look at the improvements and discuss whether you should upgrade your store.
Magento Community Edition 1.9.2
If you are still on Magento 1.6-1.8 versions let us look up on the general improvements in 1.9 edition:
- The 1.9 version is mobile-responsive, which means your website will be portable-device-friendly (it will display properly on tablets and smart phones) and it will give you some additional opportunities for SEO.
- It supports PHP 5.4.
- It has a Bill me later option and several other checkout improvements to increase your conversion.
- It allows you to trade in different countries or states, keeping the same price, regardless of tax regulations.
- The version 1.9 has improvements in the operation of currency change – there is no need to change the currency when using PayPal Standard Payments.
- Several other improvements in terms of security (e.g. billing agreements, Magento randomness function, file system security, cross-site scripting etc.)
- Fixes on Payment Methods.
- Fixes on Shopping Cart and Web Store.
- Import Fixes.
- Fixes on Promotional Price Rule, Invoicing, Credit Memo, Administrative Ordering etc.
You should know also, the older version you have now the more improvements you will get (actually, each new version has some specific features, and Version 1.4 compared to Version 1.9 will have a really small number of working tools). Also it is very important to get the most recent updates on security patches – to make your consumers experience safe and pleasant.
Magento Community 1.9.2.1 specific updates.
This recent version has been launched on August 4, 2015 with the following security patches and updates:
- Zend 1 Framework support and Reddis Integration.
- Automated Functional Testing.
- Security improvements.
Magento Enterprise Edition 1.14.2
Together with the updates to a free version of Magento the updated version of Magento Enterprise Edition has been released earlier this year.
New features of this version of hosted ecommerce solution include:
- The opportunity to categorize your products sorting them by color, position as the best product, the top rate product or the highest sold product, it is also now possible to put the newest products in the top category.
- The opportunity to use Google tag manager. It enables marketers to make the tags’ updates directly and so to save resources and time to build stronger campaigns. It also helps in Analytics and planning of further marketing campaigns.
- The Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK) for IOS. It will help you to create an IOS application for your ecommerce business, including such features as store credits, check out process, customer accounts etc.
- A great amount of other technical updates (e.g. full page caching, updated Zend 1 framework, quality enhancements).
- Several updates on the partnerships. New Relic Reporting and Lagrange Systems became Magento Gold Technology Partners. It will enable merchants to optimize the site speed, to track the application performance and managed Magento hosting environment health and to troubleshoot the problems faster.
To upgrade or not to upgrade?
The answer is – upgrade! To prevent your ecommerce store from suffering security issues and the need of a total rebuild – it needs to be updated on a regular basis.
Imagine, your best managed Magento hosting is an IPhone and you do not update your IOS version each time updates are available. If you keep on going like that for several updates, then you will get a smartphone working as a simple phone, not supporting the functions built into your device.
However, if you update regularly you receive all the new features without a need to change the smartphone itself.
Use Magento website development services and the managed website hosting to upgrade to the newest version and keep on going with all the next releases to keep your ecommerce website safe, working and bringing you joy from sales.
Have you upgraded already?
