What are the new features of Magento 2 and what Magento 2’s latest version has to offer?

We already have enjoyed the new file structure, optimized performance, improved flexibility, jQuery library and the addition of new inbuilt technologies in Magento 2 and now, with the latest addition to the Magento family - Magento 2.3, the possibilities have increased further.

• A brand new admin panel with simplified navigation of tools and that can be personalised to each user.
• New admin security which means only one person can be logged in per admin user account.
• Responsive and has touch-friendly navigation. With its drag-and-drop layout editing, you can edit your online store as you want within a few minutes of time.
• New and improved product section with new options for user notifications
• Increased customisation options for the ‘Sales – Order grid’ page and the ‘Products – Catalog’ grid page.
• Excellent M2 Filters that are great for organising the results on the page and to look at a specific subset of products or orders. Using which, you can also analyse data and monitor to keep track of customer behaviour on your store.
• Less complicated checkout processes. The quicker checkout process greatly helps in increasing conversion rates for store owners.
• Safe and secure payment methods. Popular extensions such as payment gateways like PayPal and Braintree for stores better functionality.

Now that you got a bit hold of Magento 2 feature list, let’s take a look at Magento 2’s latest version - 2.3

Magento 2.3 is no less than its previous version as it has got a lot more to offer. It surpasses its ancestors in terms of performance, security, and innovation. Magento 2's latest version has become even faster, safer and better. It has got numerous functional fixes, performance enhancements and quite a load of security updates. The following addition of features in Magento 2.3 will not only increase the performance level but will also lessen the burden on the server, thereby delivering resources faster than ever before.

In Terms of Performance

It now supports the latest version of PHP 7.2 which guarantees higher security, better performance, and a lot of many new development features.

Its 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.

With the introduction of GraphQL, including headless storefronts and PWAs, you will be able to get more refined data with fewer API requests.

The Asynchronous APIs in it will lessen the waiting period of the response to the request made by the client thus you will get quick responses.

Message Queue, which was only available to Magento commerce, is now there in Magento 2.3.0 which will ease the strain on the application band thus enhancing the performance of your Magento store.

One can save a lot of time, energy, and resources using Declarative Database Schema in it which allows developers to create, update and delete tables directly via XML.

In Terms of Security

Magento 2.3 now has the Two Factor Authentication feature in it which 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)

Magento store owners can now have the security of Google reCAPTCHA on their Magento mobile app.

Magento 2.3's 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 benefits

Magento mobile app store owners can now manage their physical inventory via multiple sources directly from the admin panel using MSI (Multi-Source Inventory).

PWA studio has been added into Magento 2.3. using which 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.

Page Builder, an easy to use drag-and-drop visual content editing tool has been introduced for extra customisations. Plus, you can also get Third Party Content Integration, including the likes of YouTube, Vimeo Videos, Google Maps and much more done as well.

Elasticsearch 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 site search capabilities, including faceted search (filtering by attributes).

In a nutshell

If you are an online store owner and are still struggling with old versions of Magento 2, it's time to get updated. MageAnts have such a huge experience of Magento and Magento 2 you can hire Magento 2 developer from MageAnts for your development.