Magento is one of the best e-commerce platforms for any medium or large-scale business looking to enhance its online store at an affordable cost. The Magento platform has grown tremendously in recent years, and it is now used by over 200000 online stores. With its high-performance features, rich scalability options, and large support community, it is easy to say that Magento is the best option that one can opt for when looking for the growth of their business.

WHAT IS MAGENTO 2?

Magento is an open-source platform. Magento 1 was the first of its version for online stores, which served well for around 8 years. But with the growing online user base, the need for business growth with better performance became a necessity that was not so easily met by the use of Magento 1.

As a result, Magento 2 was released as its replacement in 2015 to fulfill the growing expectations of businesses. Thereby, Magento 2 is the most recent version of the Magento family's e-commerce software, with the goal of enhancing the speed and performance provided by several other high-level capabilities, thus improving conversion rates for online stores.

In addition to having a steep learning curve and potential slowdowns, Magento 1 also lacks features that its competitors offer, including mobile responsiveness.

Magento 2 addresses many of these issues. Here are some of the key differences: 

- Supports the latest PHP versions which can affect site speed.

- Supports CSS3, HTML5, and MySQL

- Offers faster (on average 20%) page load speed over Magento 1. 

- Is mobile friendly

- Has a better admin interface for a better user experience for non-technical staff

- Simplifies the checkout process from six stages on Magento 1 to two stages on Magento 2.

Now, it’s important to note that there are three separate editions of Magento 2. 

Magento 2 Open Source - This is a free product anyone can download from the Magento website. The user can then install Magento but is responsible for hosting, support, and development costs.

Magento 2 Commerce - This on-premise premium option comes with added features and support. It is usually only adopted by larger businesses because the monthly costs can be steep. 

Magento 2 Commerce Cloud - A cloud-hosted version provides the same features as the on-premise Enterprise Edition but eliminates the need for self-hosting.

WHY MAGENTO 2?

Magento 2 is the ultimate shopping cart solution for your company. It provides a variety of adaptable capabilities that make it a better platform for your online stores. With Magento 2, you can easily manage your store's appearance, content, and functionality.

Following are a few of the detailed points which would help you in determining why Magento 2 is better and more convenient as an option for an e-commerce platform:

1. ADVANCED SCALABILITY AND PERFORMANCE

As compared to Magento 1, it is proven that Magento 2 works 20% faster on average. The use of Ajax makes it convenient for users to add items to the cart without the page being reloaded. Also, the feature of full-page caching built into the platform has proven to load pages a lot faster thus making it scalable for even large-scale businesses.

2. EASIER CHECKOUT PROCESS

The checkout procedure in Magento 2 now consists of only two simple stages, providing clients with a better buying experience and reducing cart abandonment. It also allows for visitor checkouts without the requirement for login and registration. Furthermore, once the buyer enters their destination address, the shipping charges are dynamically loaded. When compared to Magento 1, which featured a 6-step process, Magento 2 is sure to enhance conversion rates.

3. HIGHLY COMPATIBLE

To improve the functionality of your business, Magento 2 makes it easier to integrate third-party tools and other popular extensions, such as payment methods like Paypal and Braintree. It offers compatibility with various PHP frameworks, different databases, and web and cloud services thus making it a hassle-free application for Magento development.

4. BETTER ADMIN INTERFACE

The admin interface in Magento 2 is more user-friendly and easy to use. It is highly customizable and designed in a way to enable admins to easy accessibility of important information and easy management products. Thus it helps reduce time in managing a store online and proves to be quite beneficial.

All in all, Magento 2 provides powerful features to achieve advanced marketing, SEO Services, and catalog-management needs easily.