4 Key Performance Improvements of Magento Enterprise 1.13
One year after Magento Enterprise 1.12 was released, Roy Rubin, the CEO of Magento, announced the release of Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 at the Magento Imagine 2013 Conference on Tuesday, April 9, 2013. The upgrade to Magento Enterprise 1.13 will bring merchants improved scalability, performance, and more efficient catalog updating.
eCommerce technology is changing by the day, and merchants have to keep up with consumers' online shopping expectations. Among the expectations that consumers are demanding are improved site performance and a faster shopping experience. Additionally, merchants' business are growing rapidly, and larger scale enterprise merchants are migrating to Magento for its flexible and robust framework. As these businesses are growing, so are their traffic volumes and product catalogs. Magento had to scale its platform to handle its flourishing merchants' online environments.
Designed with the large-scale enterprise in mind, Magento Enterprise 1.13 effectively handles booming traffic volumes and vastly expanding catalogs. Simply put, Magento Enterprise 1.13 has a huge speed and scale jump in comparison to 1.12.
Here are the 4 key performance improvements of Magento Enterprise 1.13:
1. Optimized Indexing
Magento Enterprise 1.13 introduces incremental indexing that occurs faster and with no interference to the customer's shopping experience. The Magento web store is no longer locked during re-indexing, but now indexing runs as a background process. Most indexing operations in Magento Enterprise 1.13 are automated, allowing merchants to avoid full manual re-indexing.
The new optimized indexing feature will cause products, categories, URL redirects, promotions, navigational menus and product search tools to be updated as they change. In comparison to Magento Enterprise 1.12, indexing performance has improved by 83% for Mangeto Enterprise 1.13. Indexing perations that once took hours now only take minutes.
2. Improved Caching
High volume pages now load even more quickly, due to Magento Enterprise 1.13's full page caching ability. Only pages that are going through product or category changes are invalidated, thus providing greater site performance when caching content and leaving the customer shopping experience unaffected.
Magento Enterprise 1.13's improved caching performance significantly shrinks server load to support enterprise merchants' larger traffic volumes and eliminate lag. With reduced server loads, Magento 1.13 can conduct back-end operations while handling greater traffic volumes.
Magento Enterprise 1.13 also allows the option for Redis NoSQL for session storage and cache in multi-host deployments, and is recommended for new deployments. Additionally, single-host systems reap the benefits of the improved cache adapter.
3. Faster Checkout Flow
Magento Enterprise 1.13 remarkably quickens checkout by reducing page load times. Browsing and placing orders now occurs at a more rapid rate than ever before on Magento Enterprise.
Magento Enterprise 1.13 produces a 65% improvement in page load time across tested shopper flow pages. Faster checkout can drastically improve customers’ shopping experience and satisfaction. With faster page load times, Magento Enterprise Edition 1.13 allows for more page views per day and more orders per day, potentially increasing conversion rates.
4. Tax Calculations
Magento Enterprise 1.13 comes with updates and changes to sales tax, value added tax, and fixed product tax calculations. Prior versions of Magento Enterprise have been shown to produce rounding issues and create confusion for customers. Magento 1.13 addresses these tax fixes with improved tax calculation algorithms. Improved tax support is now also provided for Canadian tax requirements in this release of Magento Enterprise.
If you've ever asked "Why is Magento so slow?", it's because you're not on Magento Enterprise 1.13 yet. Contact us and we can get you started on an upgrade to the fastest, best-performing version of the Magento platform in existence.
And don't forget to keep an eye open for the next Magento upgrade that everyone is eCommerce is buzzing about: Magento 2.
