What’s New in Magento 2.4.6 & Why They Matter

On March 2023, the eCommerce giant Magento released their most advanced version, Magento 2.4.6. Packed with experience-rich features and additional capabilities, Magento 2.4.6 has significant performance and security improvements. Let’s explore in graphic detail what’s new in this latest version of Magento and why it’s essential for your eCommerce business.

What’s new in Magento 2.4.6?

This super-upgraded version of Magento comes with a bundle of power-packed features and enhancements. Before we dive deeper into them, here are the types of enhancements that come baked in with Magento 2.4.6.

• Security enhancements
• Platform enhancements
• Performance & Scalability enhancements
• General upgrades, replacements & refinements
• Other technical advancements

Key highlights of Magento 2.4.6 Release

Here’s an overview of the enhancements, fixes, and add-ons in Magento 2.4.6:

• 300+ enhancements and quality fixes
• Support for the Latest PHP 8.2
• Solution for 8 major security issues
• Improved GraphQL performance
• Reduced response time
• Compatible with PWA Studio v.13.0.x
• Compatible with Page Builder v.1.7.3
• Upgraded JavaScript libraries

Let’s look into each of these changes and enhancements and how they impact your eCommerce experiences.

Security enhancements in Magento 2.4.6

Here’s an overview of the enhancements, fixes, and add-ons in Magento 2.4.6:

• Admin console has been improved by filling the gaps in action logs.
• The actions within grid views, mass actions, and exports are audited and fixed.
• The checkout reCAPTCHA validation bug has been fixed.
• The Admin user module has been made more secure and powerful by enabling additional verification through email confirmation. With this new option, the admin user will have to go through email confirmation whenever they change their email address.

Platform enhancements in Magento 2.4.6

Magento 2.4.6 comes with enhanced support and improved compatibilities. The platform now supports the following platform enhancements.

• Composer 2.2.x.
• Redis 7.0.x.
• OpenSearch 2.x.
• Elasticsearch 8.x.
• MariaDB 10.6 (LTS version)

Performance and scalability enhancements

• A new enable/disable option has been added to ‘Customer Segments Validation.’ This inclusion allows the merchants to reduce the processing time by disabling the ‘Real-time Check if Customer is Matched by Segment’ setting in the configurations. This change improves operational performance, especially when there are 100+ customer segments.
• Product grid performance has been facilitated with a new option where the merchants can limit the number of products in the grid desirably. With this new limit imposed on the number of products displayed, merchants can expect boosted operational efficiency for grids.
• The way merchants import data into the Magento store has been drastically improved and made faster. The new import enhancement allows up to 100,000 records per minute. Merchants can now use the new POST /rest//V1/import/csv REST API endpoint to import data faster and more accurately into their Magento store. Additionally, this upgraded endpoint now supports CSV formats too.
• Merchants who use Magento 2.4.6 cloud infrastructure will now enjoy an improved high-throughput order processing performance powered by load re-balancing. When there is a high volume of simultaneous orders (say, 1000 orders per minute), merchants can balance the load on their database across different nodes. Additionally, they can also re-balance this load through secondary connections, Redis instances, and MySQL database.

General upgrades, replacements & refinements

Technical advancements in Magento.2.4.6

• Enhanced Braintree Payment Method: Magento 2.4.6 payment module comes with several refreshing improvements, like enabling the ‘Pay Later’ option for select countries, PayLater messaging with PayPal Vault, added Fraud Protection, and ACH webhooks. In addition to that, there is a Fraud Protection webhook that will be triggered if any risk is detected in Braintree. When the status of an ACH payment is updated to declined or settled, that will send alerts to the ACH webhook
• GraphQL Enhancements: This includes improved response time, performance optimization in category tree rendering, reduced query response time for bulk cart operations, order sorting in customer queries, etc.
• Page Builder & PWA Studio Compatibility:Magento 2.4.6 is compatible with Page Builder v.1.7.3 and PWA Studio v.13.0.x. This upgrade comes with multiple enhancements to improve the overall accessibility.
• Magento Commerce Extension metapackage: Magento 2.4.6 introduces the new metapackage v1.1.0 that bundles select extensions automatically with the core release. When the Magento version is upgraded to the latest core release, the versions of these extensions are installed in appropriate versions, simplifying the process of upgrading the extensions separately. The Magento Commerce Extension metapackage 2.4.6 includes two extensions, namely Bolt Quick Checkout and Magento I/O Events for Magento Commerce.
• Magento I/O Events for Magento Commerce: This new enablement captures events and data, and transfers them from Magento Commerce to other associated systems. This allows developers to build cloud-native apps in App Builder that are integrated with Commerce events such as order status changes, inventory updates, and changes in price. Additionally, this capability can be utilized to exchange data for the orchestration of the entire shopping journey across the mission-critical systems of Magento Commerce.
• Integration with Magento IMS: A few disparate modules, such as adobe-ims, adobe-ims-api, admin-adobe-ims are decoupled from the Magento Commerce 2.4.6 core code and are now packaged as the new adobe-ims-metapackage v2.2.0. This does not imply any change in functionality.

How Magento 2.4.6 benefits eCommerce store owners?

One of the primary advantages of upgrading to Magento 2.4.6 is improved performance. This improvement in performance means that customers can navigate through the site with ease, leading to a better user experience. Here are the other business benefits and technical advantages you can expect with this update:

• Removed or reduced dependencies in many areas
• Enhancements in the platform’s architecture
• Well-optimized codebase
• Faster response times
• Enhanced security
• Maximized scalability
• Number of bugs largely reduced to a great extent

Why should you upgrade to Magento 2.4.6?

To fully leverage these benefits, eCommerce store owners should consider upgrading to Magento 2.4.6. Here are the top 4 reasons why you should make the upgrade right away:

• To get rid of compatibility issues: By upgrading, merchants can also eliminate compatibility issues that may arise with older versions.
• To enjoy an error-free experience: A number of pressing concerns and issues that were thought perennial have been fixed and resolved in this latest version of Magento.
• End-of-Life is nearing: Furthermore, the End-of-Life (EOL) for Magento 2.3.x versions is nearing in less than a year, which means that merchants will not receive any updates or security patches for those versions.

Therefore, upgrading to Magento 2.4.6 is necessary to ensure that merchants have access to the latest features and security patches, keeping their stores secure and their customers’ data safe.

If you don’t upgrade now, here’s what you’ll be missing out on:

• Improved admin action logs
• Tough-to-crack passwords
• Accurate reCAPTCHA validation
• Enhanced accessibility through Sign In visual text labels, verbal descriptive labels
• Uncompromised user experience for keyboard-only shoppers
• PayLater messaging
• Local Payment Methods (LPM)
• Faster response time with GraphQL
• Super-optimized shopping cart and checkout
• Instant addition of products to meet the minimum quantity
• Accurate calculation of the total refunds
• Error-free Google reCAPTCHA for storefront orders
• Appropriate product images in mini cart
• Enhancements in coupon management
• No errors in coupon code generation
• Validation logic for Manage Coupon Codes
• Reward points auto-integrated into the customer’s account
• New option to filter coupon reports
• Enhanced Order Total report
• Better search suggestions for the users
• Correct Free Shipping Cart rule for calculating FedEx, USPS, and UPS shipping rates
• No errors in multiple unit tests
• Better Wishlist modules that work well with Magento 2 versions

Wrapping up

The Magento 2.4.6 release has been a remarkable milestone for both online shoppers as well as merchants. Magento store owners will experience an easy selling experience through enhanced inventory management and higher store performance. Similarly, Magento 2.4.6 delights shoppers with a seamless and supercharged shopping experience.

Now is the best time to upgrade to Magento 2.4.6. Book a free consultation with one of our certified Magento Commerce specialists to understand the budget, timeline, and other aspects involved in upgrading your store.