In August, Adobe announced a new update to their eCommerce platform, Adobe Commerce (also known as Magento Open Source). This update is called Adobe Commerce 2.4.5 and provides nearly 290 additional fixes, enhancements to the core code, and much more. Read on to learn more about the highlights of this update and why now is the best time to upgrade your online business.

Overall, many of the changes made to Adobe Commerce have been designed to provide business owners the ability to create powerful personalized experiences. Research has shown that consumers prefer to spend their time and money at businesses that can provide them with unique experiences that are targeted to their preferences. This can be challenging in the virtual realm. Adobe seeks to remove some of these obstacles through this latest update.

For example, one of the highlights of this latest Magento version is that user personalization data can now be shared with the entire Adobe Experience Cloud platform of solutions. This data often comes in the form of user activities such as products viewed, items added to their cart, and customer logins. Until this latest Magento upgrade, this data could not easily be shared.

Adobe has also expanded the functionality of its Live Search solution that ships as an independent SaaS service within Adobe Commerce. Live Search uses machine learning powered by Adobe Sensei to personalize the search experience. As of the 2.4.5 update, Live Search can now be used for B2B commerce use cases and now supports B2B pricing as well as customer groups. This means a superior experience for both you and your customers when it comes to searching available offerings on your site.

If you are considering an update to your Magento site, why not work with the top-rated Adobe Commerce Magento Developer? Based out of Coral Springs, Florida, our mission is to deliver high ROI projects with our unique set of skills. As an Adobe Commerce (Magento) web development company, we are ideally suited to help you with upgrading your Magento 2 business.

Enhancements To Security

Security is vital for any eCommerce business. Increasingly, hackers have turned to small and medium-sized businesses that do not usually have the budget or access to the security tools and experienced professionals employed by larger enterprises. This latest update to Adobe Commerce provides 20 different security fixes and platform security improvements. The team at Adobe identified several vulnerabilities that could be exploited to gain access to customer information or take over administrator sessions and closed them down. To date, no attacks have been attributed to these vulnerabilities, but it is crucial to remember to keep your software up to date. Cybercriminals view organizations with legacy software as particularly desirable soft targets precisely because of these remaining vulnerabilities.

Additionally, reCAPTCHA support has been added to the Wish List Sharing, Create New Customer Account, and Gift Card forms. reCAPTCHA’s are special tests that provide a special layer of security to ensure that the form user is a human user and not a bot. Cybercriminals can use bots to repeatedly request the same action and create a denial of service attack. This technology helps prevent that from happening. ACL resources were added to the Inventory. Inventory template security has also been enhanced.

Enhancements To The Platform

Magento Open Source has been updated to support Composer 2.2, Tiny MCE (5.10.2), jQueryUI, and PHPStan. Performance has also been improved, enabling 3X the rate of orders processed per hour. If your organization is rapidly growing and getting large amounts of orders in a short period of time, this performance update is vital. Furthermore, Adobe Commerce now supports 3X the page views per hour and 2X concurrent admin users. Overall, this means a more stable, scalable eCommerce platform. Many of these performance improvements have been achieved through the adoption of PHP 8.1, a significant update to the PHP language released in 2021. Magento B2B commerce catalogs have also been improved, and duplicate SKU data from shared catalogs has been removed, allowing customers to have access to more extensive, more complex catalogs. The platform has also been updated to support the latest version of DHL’s shipping integration schema.

Because flexibility is vital in the eCommerce industry, Adobe has also been increasing support for different payment options. This update adds support for Apple Pay and gives your customers the option to use it on your site. You can easily toggle Apple Pay on or off when logged into the platform as an admin.

Accessibility Updates

It’s crucial to ensure that everyone can have the best experience possible on your site. That’s why Adobe’s latest update provides a search results summary information announcement to screen reader users. Screen readers are also now informed when a new page view loads. Furthermore, contrast and keyboard accessibility have been improved.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to help businesses and individuals track and manage online data. Recently, they updated the tracking and integration mechanisms of Google Ads and Analytics in web applications through integration with GTag. This update improves the current Google services integration already present within Adobe Commerce to support the use of the GTag APIs for integrating modules like Google Ads and Google Analytics. All of these improvements make it easier to track and manage your content with the power of Google Analytics.

GraphQL

GraphQL is an open-source data query language designed to support application programming interfaces (APIs). With the latest 2.4.5 update, GraphQL API has been optimized to improve the customer and developer experience. Practically, this means 5% faster response times as well as an 80% reduction in the time it takes to rebuild a GraphQL schema.

Upgrade Magento 2

We have only scratched the surface of the many different features and upgrades made to the Magento Open Source platform as a result of this recent Adobe Commerce 2.4.5 update. In order to learn more about the many new improvements, check out the official Magento release notes for the update here.

If you are considering the upgrade from Magento 2.4.4 to 2.4.5, it’s important to be careful and work with professionals. A wrong move could result in a loss of your data. That’s why we recommend taking advantage of a Magento 2 upgrade service. At Rave Digital, we are passionate about Magento development and can help you update Magento 2 for your business. Our team of Adobe Commerce (Magento) experts can help you upgrade Magento versions and ensure that your business can quickly start taking advantage of the many opportunities of this latest update. We are an Adobe commerce (Magento) development agency made up of over 50 Adobe Commerce (Magento) certified developers. Hire one of our Adobe Commerce (Magento) developers today, and experience the difference!