Magento 2.4 Commerce and Cloud is coming. Soon. As of June 24 the BETA program is available and our team at Accorin is evaluating it and getting ready for its release in early Q3.
If we begin an upgrade or platform migration with you soon, we would be discussing the pros and cons of moving forward with a current release or ramping up on 2.4 as soon as it’s available. There are a number of changes and improvements coming with 2.4 which promises to be the most significant release in quite some time.
The purpose of this post is to highlight the aspects of Magento 2.4 that we believe are the most noteworthy. And if you would like to talk with us about this release and whether or not to upgrade to it early / as soon as it’s available, please contact us.
Here are the most important aspects of 2.4 we believe you should be thinking about:
1. Security Enhancements – Over 30!
Magento claims there are over 30 fixes coming out. The most important one might be 2-Factor Authentication (2FA). Per their release notes: Admin users must first configure their 2FA before logging into the Admin through either the UI or a web API. 2FA is enabled by default and cannot be disabled. This extra step of authentication makes it harder for malicious users to log in to the Admin without authorization.
Also important to us is the configuration change that data rendering for UI data providers is now disabled by default. This removes an opportunity for malicious users to execute arbitrary JavaScript.
Most of the security enhancements that are coming out in late July with 2.4 are changes to configurations and your Magento developer should be able to guard against security threats without them. No doubt, Magento will be more secure “out of the box†with 2.4.
2. Platform Upgrades – Catalog Site Search is a Big One
If you’re an Elastic Search fan you’re going to like this one because it will be out of the box by default with this release. Elasticsearch 7.6.x will be the default catalog search engine for Magento Commerce and Open Source. You cannot install or upgrade to Magento 2.4.0 without also installing Elasticsearch 7.6.x. Elasticsearch version 2.x code has been removed. Elasticsearch versions 5.x and 6.x have been deprecated and are no longer supported.
Elasticsearch provides the following benefits:
- Quick and advanced searches on products in the catalog
- Support for multiple languages
- Support for stop words and synonyms
- Shoppers are not disrupted while Elasticsearch reindexes
- Accurate, performant, and scalable
- Works well out of the box
- Easy to horizontally scale
- Supports real-time data and analysis
- Can be used as a document-oriented data store
- Applications in framework beyond search, including reporting, personalization, performance, and storage
- Elasticsearch now supports the use of partial words in search terms for product names and SKUs when using quick search.
3. Performance Advances (read: SPEED!)
There are a number of adjustments in this release that should improve performance of your Magento e-commerce store out of the box including the ability for merchants to use “lazy loading†when loading images. Expect improvement of 25-30% to quick order “add to cart†performance, improved caching of results of SQL queries to inventory tables, and multiple optimizations to Redis.
With Google set to increase the importance of page load speeds with the introduction of Core Web Vitals as ranking signals, ensuring faster load times will be ever more critical over the next year.
4. Inventory Management
There will be support for in-store pick up and bundling “out-of-the-box†without the need for extensions. Having this as core functionality will accelerate the pace at which stores can be built and promoted to the market.
5. B2B
Some of the more notable B2B enhancements include the long-anticipated B2B order approval module and log-in-as-a customer (again all now out-of-the-box).
The Bottom Line
Magento 2.4 is a big release with some key new features and functionality. If you’re considering, or about to engage with Accorin for an upcoming project or support services, we will be raising the topic of which version to upgrade to now that 2.4 is finally here.
For some merchants it might be worth waiting for a future release if the enhancements aren’t important to your particular business but as always we will evaluate your specific business case and make the recommendation we feel is right for you.
If you’re interested in reading all of the Magento 2.4 release notes, you can view them, here.
