On September 18th, Magento released its latest and greatest version of Magento - version 2.2.6. While this update is loaded with core code fixes (over 150) and community-submitted updates (over 350), the primary newsmakers in this update are the 25 critical security updates. Because of these updates (and the fact that these patches make the security issues more public), Magento is urging its all Magento 2 customers to update to Magento 2.2.6 as soon as possible. As DMi works through this update with our Magento clients, we are excited about the following updates to the constantly improving platform.

• “Category product indexer logic has been optimized, and re-indexing time has decreased up to 98%, from 40 minutes to one minute for 100,000 categories. Previously, when your store contained many categories (100,0000), Magento could take up to 40 minutes to re-index product catalogs.”
  • Reindexing is often a pain point with clients looking for immediate updates to their site. Reducing reindex time will minimize confusion and frustration while waiting for changes to take effect on the front end. If a product is not in the correct category or a new release needs to be available for purchase, the desire is often to have changes happen immediately, so this will be a welcome update.
• “The catalog rule re-indexing operation has been optimized, and the average re-indexing time (which depends on rule conditions) has improved by more than 80%. Previously, a full catalog rule re-index operation on a medium B2C store took more than 20 minutes.”
  • Similarly, having catalog price rules take effect on the front end has historically been a slow process, and it often occurs when a large group of users are on the site waiting for changes to show. Having catalog price rules show on the front end faster will be a nice upgrade, especially as our clients are preparing to launch more sales around the holidays.
• “The time required to load a store’s home page has been reduced noticeably when the top menu contains many categories.”
  • Some of our clients have category structures in their navigation that are quite large (200+ categories), so homepage navigation load times have been slow at times. All site owners are concerned with site speed, and the homepage is most often where site speed is first experienced and is tested, so speeding up the homepage via more efficient loading of categories in the nav is a good step forward. It will be interesting to see if we notice and jumps in our site speed using the metrics we track on a weekly basis
• “Improvements to the reliability and ease of the checkout process”
  • We have experienced issues with the cart emptying or checkout being interrupted for various reasons, and we worked with Magento to point out and suggest fixes for these issues, so we’re happy to see some improvements in this area.

Of course the security patches are a critical piece of this release, but we are excited about the speed and functionality improvements as well. Additionally we’re encouraged by the significant input Magneto has taken from their very devoted developer community, which contains a few skilled DMi developers.

To learn more about DMi Partners’ ecommerce management services, on Magento or any other platform, contact us today.