The Need to Upgrade to Modern Magento Version

Magento team has a good practice to keep announcing new platform upgrades regularly. Every couple of month a minor upgrade takes place and on an average, a critical upgrade bearing the latest features and supplementary changes to the core is more or less certain every quarter. In retrospect, since the launch of Magento 2.0 in November 2015 there were almost 30 releases in an average for Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. It is quite a lot to choose from the Magento offers. Now the question is: do these upgrades actually has any significance or carry any value to the website?

Just imagine you run a brick and mortar store. Is there a necessity to improve it often? Do you go for new furniture, paint a fresh coat of color to the walls, and clean the windows? Here the answer is definitely in the affirmative… “Yes” only if you do care about making your shop look appealing, presentable and to improve your customers’ experience. The same applies to any E-Commerce website. It requires improvements and one of the best ways is to upgrade the platform when new releases are launched in terms of upgrade modules or software.

Some of the most important reasons to consider a Magento upgrade are listed below:

Security

If you go to see, most of the releases have technical glitches on the security front.  Besides, most of the new versions include all security patches continuing from previous updates.

Performance improvements

Occasionally, a new version would include different performance enhancements achieved by the platform code optimization. These improvements and upgrade are a regular feature.

Functional Fixes and Code Augmentations

Generally, the Magento team works hard to optimize the platform code regularly.  However, if some of the features require improvements, they add fixes accordingly.

New features

Normally, new features help extend the website’s functionality therefore many versions contain such features and also attempting improving the general customer experience as well as admin experience.

In conclusion, the most important aspect is Magento platform upgrades help in order to keep your website safe and up-to-date. Consistent and systematic code optimizations that come with the upgrades have a positive impact on the website performance and functionality.   One need not do performance optimizations often as upgrades mostly cover it.

Lastly, certainly not the least – new features of Magento; It is always better to use native Magento functionality as much as possible and reduce the number of 3rd party modules including other customization on the website.  This precaution is to avoid additional conflicts and performance problems that can be caused by extending the website’s functionality if it is wrongly operated.

As Magento upgrade is a complex job, we would advise you to take the assistance of an expert in the field, who would also be able to fix all related issues on the website in the future. It is better to have a clean Magento installation, without any customizations or 3rd party modules. As it is quite likely, technical issues may crop up and you will need to fix them which are a headache.

However, the most common issues are related to the 3rd party modules and also themes as versions are not compatible with the latest Magento version.

Follow the simple plan when upgrading Magento on your website:

Ensure Magento core files are not overwritten.

Check whether all of the extensions on the website are relevant and then dump the ones not needed.

Remember to check whether all 3rd party extensions (including the theme) are compatible with the new Magento version.

Get upgraded Magento on the development website and also make sure that the development website is the exact copy of the live website.

Remember to test the website for any issues. Fix them instantly.

Do not forget to double check the result of the development environment.

Release the upgrade.

Test the live website once more, finally.

It is the policy of Magento to notify about new launches by displaying the information in the admin panel. You may also read about it on the official Magento website. We trust our above suggestions will facilitate you to upgrade Magento easily and we believe everything will go smoothly and without any technical glitches.