Magento 2.3 is coming in 2019 – New Features and What to Expect

For a long time now, Magento has been the dominant platform for eCommerce worldwide. Following its recent Beta release, coming into 2019 Magento will officially launch its latest beast; Magento 2.3.

Declared to be bigger and better than even before, Magento 2.3 will have a whole host of new capabilities not seen before. These are focussed around enhancing experience, performance and security for online stores. The whole suite of new tools has been designed with merchants in mind – to enhance your growth in 2019 and beyond.  

What are the stand out features included with Magento 2.3?

There are a multitude of enhancements coming with this release but there are two particularly exciting stand out features to be highlighted above all else:

• PWA (Progressive Web Applications); and
• Page Builder

Let’s delve a little further into what these features are and the capabilities they will unlock.

PWA Studio (Progressive Web Applications)

It’s no secret that mobile shopping is increasing exponentially; in 2019 over 75% of users are expected to frequently utilise mobile shopping. With the launch of Magento 2.3 you will be able to harness the mobile user market like never before through PWA Studio.

Merchants will now have the ability to deliver simulated app experiences for mobile commerce, to drive bigger and better returns through improved conversion rates, experience and engagement.  In fact, PWA Studio has been proven to improve SEO with a 50% uplift in conversion and 50% better page performance.

Key benefits of PWA include the ability to induct changes much faster than ever before, at a lower production cost whilst incorporating open web standards. The best part is that by Magento’s admission, it’s all been designed with the developer in mind, and has developed for your growth through mobile.

Page Builder

Page Builder is a particularly exciting addition for those who hold the Commerce version of Magento. Where the Open Source version of Magento is available to all with no associated license costs, the Commerce version comes with a monthly license fee, and provides feature and support enhancement. The new Page Builder feature is an added benefit to the Commerce version only.

This is a particularly exciting addition and is intended to revolutionise page creation. It will provide “drag and drop” capability when creating new pages – as opposed to building pages and then handling the content separately through the use of HTML and CSS.

Time saving, intuitive and easy to use it will put power into the hands of users with no access to a front-end developer. New product lines and categories can be launched quickly and easily, enhanced with rich images, banners, videos and other creative, in a theme to match your existing design with no coding required. Magento have said that the end results will allow for the creation of fully customisable and dynamic front-end experiences with preview capability built in.

It looks as though new pages will be easier and quicker to create than ever before!

What else is new with Magento 2.3?

There is a multitude of other exciting new features included in the 2.3 release.

• The ability to easily manage inventory across multiple locations, accelerate fulfilment, and improve checkout performance with Multi-Source Inventory.
• New, scalable Asynchronous & Bulk Web APIs, enabling a higher level of control over execution and timing of API calls, allowing for faster performance.
• ElasticSearch will now be available to Open Source users whereas previously it was only accessible by Commerce users only. The powerful search functionality is an exciting addition.
• Indexation time reduced by over 60% through sharding and parallel processing to aid larger sites, leading to faster product updates.
• Developers now have the ability to declare the final desired state of the database with declarative schema.

Are there any further enhancements to existing features?

In the 2.3 release, Magento have further improved existing features. This is in line with increasing security requirements as well as additional PHP support and new functionality for fulfilment options.

• Two Factor Authentication and Google ReCAPTCHA security tools to protect your stores
• New functionality and expanded global availability for Magento Shipping
• Added support for PHP 7.2

For additional information about everything included in Magento 2.3, refer to the official release notes. If you are interested in the new features and would like to discuss migrating your existing site to Magento 2.3, or would like a new site to be built, get in touch.