Great news for Magento merchants! On February 9, 2021, B2B and B2C merchants will be able to upgrade to the latest Magento 2.4.2 release.
Merchants who will move to the new Magento 2.4.2 release will benefit from noticeable security enhancements, performance enhancements, and platform improvements.
This release includes several major improvements to Magento Core Quality 2.4.0. with more than 280 new fixes and more than 35 security improvements.
Here are the 7 main highlights of the Magento 2.4.2 release:
- Substantial security enhancements
- Improved platform quality & performance
- Increase scale to support large, complex catalogs
- New B2B capabilities
- Faster time to market & lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with PWA Studio
- Media Gallery and Page Builder enhancements
- Interactive In-Product Guidance
1. Substantial security enhancements
The Magento 2.4.2 release includes over 35 security fixes and improvements to keep your clients’ information and eCommerce store safe.
Your eCommerce website can be a major target for hackers and fraudsters since it holds thousands of user IDs, personal information, and critical financial information. That’s why making your website secure should be a priority for all merchants.
2. Improved platform quality & performance
With Magento 2.4.2 update, you will get a general amelioration of the platform with more than 280 quality fixes.
You will also benefit from having an eCommerce platform with higher API performance. In other words, improving your API allows you to deliver a faster and more superior user experience as information across multiple platforms and applications interact better.
3. Increase scale to support large, complex catalogs
With the new update, merchants will also get enhancements to enable Magento 2.4.2 to support complex catalogs and multi-store merchants natively.
This means if you have an eCommerce store that hosts hundreds of products that are located in multiple inventories with multiple customer groups, these new scalability enhancements will enable your Magento store to be 20x more effective at handling everything.
4. New B2B capabilities
With the new Magento 2.4.2 release, B2B merchants will get a better buyer and seller purchase approval experience that includes support for online payments. This gives merchants the flexibility to accept purchasing policies regardless of payment method.
There are also added GraphQL APIs to improve B2B headless capabilities in:
- Company users: Create, update, or remover administrators, users, roles, and teams.
- Company query: Request company details, structure, credit details, and credit history.
- Login as a customer: Generate a customer admin token to enable remote purchasing assistance for B2B buyers.
- Requisition lists: Create, delete or update requisition lists. Create, update, delete, copy, and more list items. Add list items to the cart.
5. Faster time to market & lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with PWA Studio
Extensibility improvements and performance optimizations have been made within the PWA Studio. This will enable merchants to accelerate the launch of international high-performing PWAs websites with multi-language and multi-currency support.
The added features and enhancements result in a faster time to market and reduce the total cost of ownership with PWA Studio.
6. Media Gallery and Page Builder enhancements
Enhancements have been made in the Media Gallery, where you can now take any media gallery object and optimize it for web use without losing quality while improving website performance.
According to HTTP Archive, images make up on average 21% of a total webpage’s weight. If you’re a merchant, this means this new improvement will allow you to improve your page loading speeds and SEO.
Another nice enhancement is the Page Builder update, which reduces developers’ effort to migrate content and customize Page Builder CSS. This means your development team will have more time to improve other more crucial components of your website.
7. Interactive In-Product Guidance
While Magento offers an infinite of eCommerce capabilities to merchants, it is still a complex platform to master with a bit of a learning curve. Here comes the newly added Interactive In-Product Guidance. It now provides you with help and tips on better using the product from within the Admin UI.
Content such as new feature announcements, walk-through guides, onboarding information, tooltips, and more will be available via this feature. The new In-Product Guidance will allow you to get better results for the effort you have put into Magento.
Conclusion
With the Magento 2.4.2 release, it’s all about improving your Magento store’s general security, quality, and performance.
As a merchant, making the upgrade will allow you to get new B2B capabilities, better content management performance with enhancements to the Media Gallery and Page Builder, a boosted PWA Studio storefront that reduce your total cost of ownership and market entry time, as well as an In-Product Guidance to give you hands-on training of the platform.
What are your thoughts on the Magento 2.4.2 release? Leave us your comments in the section below.
Magento Support
You always want an upgrade to be seamless, and you may need an experienced Magento agency to minimize risk with their Magento support. If you need help with upgrading your Magento and support, get in touch with our Magento team of experts.