Ready for the future with Adobe Commerce 2.4.4

At the end of April, Adobe released their latest new release, 2.4.4. This release takes new steps forward in terms of e-commerce capabilities, security and performance. There are also many technical improvements that make the development process smoother. 

Both Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce are switching to PHP 8.1 in this new 2.4.4 release. This provides a lot of technical improvements, namely:

• Maintenance and upgrades are easier and more cost-effective
• Significant performance and scalability improvements
• Improved developer experience and tools
• Improved site stability

What does this mean in practice? This version is the fastest Adobe Commerce version already released. You can now confidently work with complex catalogs up to 10 times larger than before, in addition, large numbers of transactions are processed as much as 5 times faster, and we see marked performance improvements for both the back-end and storefront thanks to the adoption of PHP 8.1.

Security

In addition to the PHP upgrade, a lot of security enhancements are also provided, of course. One important one is the switch at integration tokens. Previously, an integration token could be used as a standalone key for token-based authentication. However, this behavior has been disabled by default because of the security implications of a never-expired access token. This means that authentication now runs via OAuth, so this change will impact all of your integrations.
 

Platform improvements

A lot of platform improvements have also been provided by Adobe! For example, JQuery has been upgraded, as well as PHPUnit, Elasticsearch and TinyMCE.

Caching

The caching strategy was also significantly improved in release 2.4.4. Whereas previously placing an order caused all ordered products to be pulled from the Varnish cache, this is no longer the case. In addition, when you update a product from top categories or perform an indexation to update product attributes or inventory status, the full site page cache is no longer cleared. This ensures that we can now offer your end users a faster web shop experience.

For both Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce, the 2.4.4 release also includes some functional improvements. For example, the code base was “stripped down. Specifically, this means that modules such as Amazon Pay, dotdigital, Klarna, Vertex and YotPo are no longer put in the code base by default, which ensures better performance since fewer modules need to be loaded. Of course, these modules remain available, but now they must be actively downloaded.

Accessibility updates

Screen accessibility for all audiences is becoming more and more important, so Adobe has also paid due attention to this. Indeed, this release includes improved tooltips, accessible naming and tagging of screen elements and redesigned icons and buttons. More than 80% of these solutions help improve the shopping experience for users without vision or with limited vision.

Pagebuilder

For many of our customers it was already good news that Pagebuilder also became available for Open Source in version 2.4.3, but now it is also possible to add an alt text to images. This not only helps with SEO, it also contributes to better accessibility.

Bug fixes

Of course, Adobe also provided many bug fixes, both for products, the shopping cart, categories, emails, images and much more. A complete list can be found in the release notes, which can be found here.
 

For those customers using the paying Adobe Commerce version, several improvements have also been made to Adobe Sensei, the AI element in Adobe. This ensures that not only can you offer AI-driven product recommendations and search, but also that the buying experience is fully tailored to each customer to accelerate product discovery, increase conversion, and increase average order value.

In addition, SWAT (pictured below), better known as Site-Wide Analysis Tool is now made available to every Adobe Commerce customer, where previously it was only available to Adobe Commerce Cloud customers. Thanks to this tool, you now have access to real-time monitoring, reporting, insights and recommendations. In addition to expanded access, the Site-Wide Analysis Tool dashboard has also been enhanced to serve as a central repository for access to Adobe Commerce support tools. This provides users with a single viewpoint and easier access to other support tools, including useful support resources, recommendations, managed alerts and an extension summary. In future iterations, this dashboard will be updated with additional widgets that provide new insights.
 

Finally, the Adobe Live Search was also improved as well as bugs in the RMA module, reward points, the staging module, etc. A full list of issues that were fixed can be found in the release notes. These can be found here for Adobe Commerce.

PWA

Also for our clients using PWA Studio, this release includes a lot of new GraphQL endpoints. Among others, additional functionality has been provided for B2B features and for the admin. In addition, there is now support for dynamic blocks and targeted promotions, allowing marketers and merchandisers to build personalized content and shopping cart promotions for specific customer segments. Thus, thanks to this update, there is less need for custom development, which ensures a lower total cost of ownership and faster turnaround time.

Performance

A lot of attention was also given by Adobe to speeding up GraphQL requests, especially in the shopping cart. In addition, Storefront performance was improved by changes to the way GraphQL requests are cached. Indeed, Fastly and Varnish now cache GraphQL requests sent with auth tokens.