Glorified as one of the leading E-commerce development platforms, Magento continues to fascinate all developers and designers across the globe. Introduced with an impressive set of features in 2008, Magento was launched with much speculations to revolutionize the shopping experience of the web users. And continuing its reign in the E-commerce domain, the experienced community of Magento introduced an advanced Magento 2 in 2015 with claims to have greater performance and feature set as compared to it predecessor.
Before we compare and state the verdict in favor of any of the two, let us first explore these two versions specifically.
Magento
Magento was primarily released as an open-source E-commerce platform in 2008. No wonder, each and every developer, designer and businessmen were excited and eagerly waiting for this launch. As the functionality of Magento was much ahead of its competitors at that time. The unmatched functionality of this E-commerce platform was meticulously utilized to create innovative shopping carts and E-commerce websites. Witnessing such rising demand in the industry, developers shifted towards getting trained in this technology and working on it as a professional Magento developer. This is the reason, why more than 25% of the global E-commerce sites are running seamlessly on Magento for eCommerce website development.
Magento is available in three editions namely –
(I) Community Edition
(ii) Enterprise Edition (EE)
(iii) Magento Go (not functional anymore).
The major reason that contributed to its rising popularity amidst developers is its unique set of features that can be used to create user-friendly E-commerce stores.
Magento 2
As progress is an ongoing process, this means each and every shopping website must constantly improve to sustain within the competition. Undoubtedly, Magento has learned this rule long before and thus it launched Magento 2 to prove its mettle in the web industry. This advanced version of Magento descendant is highly anticipated by global developers, for its matchless set of features.
Magento 2 is a next-gen open source platform which is faster, simpler and secure than its predecessor. And within few days from its launch, Magento 2 successfully carved an amazing niche for itself in the digital marketplace.
Reasons Contributing To The Fall Of Magento 1.x And Rise Of Magento 2.0
- As the first version of Magento is not based on Zend framework, so it faces performance glitches many a times.
- Primary or basic level customization processes can be easily done on Magento 1 but when it comes to performing some advanced customization, many of the developers preferred its succeeding version.
- Magento 1 requires added investments semi-oriented VPS server just to share the platform.
- Also, it occupies more system space and the memory.
These are some key factors that played a major role in the introduction of advanced Magento 2.0 version.
Key Differences Between Magento And Magento 2.0
Now, we will discuss the major differences between Magento 1 and 2.0 on the basis of structure, inbuilt technologies, performance, community support, extensibility, and much more.
Inbuilt Functionalities
Magento 2.0 uses the latest technologies and the advanced PHP version i.e 5.4 and 5.5 along with HTML5/CSS3.3 with recent versions of jQuery. See below table to get a quick overview of the overall differences between Magento 1 and 2.0
Image source: shopping-cart-migration.com
Customization
Unlike its previous version, Magento 2 comes with a proficient visual design editor that allows easy and smooth customization.
Module Structure
Magento 2 includes set of modules that allow easy administration of code in their sites. This remarkable functionality enables admins to easily edit, enable or disable components in the site as per the business requisites.
Performance
Since Magento 2 is based on the latest version of PHP thus providing up-to-date security fixes and bug free support throughout. The JavaScript use is minimized and bundled along with improved browser caching support for static content in the site. And as far as image optimization is concerned, they can be directly optimized on server unlike done manually before. All these advancements have helped in improving the site performance.
Admin Panel
As compared to its previous version, Magento 2 subsume an intuitive admin panel that is more user-friendly. And the reasons contributing to the same are:
- Simplified navigation
- Feature-rich dashboard
- Easy-to-use product upload function
- Options to link videos with images
- Quick data import
And the most important is, data migration tool that allows easy migration of data from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Cost required
Magento 2 can be easily installed and upgraded requiring minimum upgrade costs and time. However, you must consider installing Magento 2 under expert supervision only.
Community Support
Due to the rising demand of Magento 2, a large group of expert Magento developers and designers have joined Magento community. These Magento professionals are continually researching and working on this new version since its release. Such a strong community support in not offered in any other platforms.
Search Engine Optimization
In each of the catalog pages include rich snippets that ensure improved visibility on the search engines.
Timeline Review of Magento and Magento 2 in Google Trends
These above-mentioned matchless functionality and features have contributed to the rising popularity of Magento 2 in different regions and timeline. Here is a graphical representation of the rise and fall of Magento 1 and Magento 2.0 in last 8 years on Google trends.
Magento
As you can see, the popularity of Magento continued to rise since its initial release in 2008. With maximum reach in July 2012, this version of Magento witnessed an undulating graph from there onward. And in August 2016, a significant fall in the popularity of Magento has been witnessed.
Magento 2.0
There has been a steep rise in the popularity of Magento 2 in 2014, right from its month of release i.e december and is continuously increasing since then.
On comparing these two versions comma you would find that there is a significant rise in the popularity of Magento 2 since its official release in year 2012. Magento 2 exhibited its highest popularity in December 2014, April 2015 and July 2016.
Conclusion
As you can see, the popularity and investment on Magento 2 is growing day by day. Many of the web masters working on Magento 1 are still skeptical about shifting to this new version whereas on the other hand, Magento 2 developers are actively creating extensions for it.
Undeniably, Magento 2.0 is a boon for all who are looking forward to having some advanced E-commerce solutions into their website. Migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2.0 requires professional expertise of a Magento developer. So, hire an expert Magento developer from a recognized web design and development company such as CSSChopper, known to deliver exceptional Magento services to its clients. Our company employs a team of expert Magento developers who strive to cater best-in-class Magento services to the global clients. To know more about the flexible hiring options and offers, you can contact us at [email protected] and take your business to next new level.
