PHP 7: making the most out of Magento 2 shopsystem! [5 Reading tips]

Are your sites running on PHP-based systems such as Magento, WordPress or Joomla? Then you cannot ignore what it is seen for many as the most substantial shift the PHP world has experienced for ages! PHP 7 aims to revolutionize developers’ ecosystem improving significantly performance and usability as well as offering a wide range of new features to make the servers run more efficiently.

Main benefits

Today, 82 percent of websites use PHP as the main programming language. It is certainly growing in popularity and there are many reasons that explain the new upgrade to PHP 7:

As more and more people coming online and the number of mobile users multiply all over the world, servers must be able to react quickly to user requests. Actually, studies show that 40 percent of people will abandon a web page that takes more than three seconds to load, demonstrating that speed is a crucial factor in website design.
Significant improvement on the level of performance.
The need to develop scripting languages that run more efficiently. This demand is driven by two factors: the need to reduce costs and the need to reduce power consumption to protect the environment.

Taking these facts into account, the main benefits that PHP 7 presents in comparison to its predecessor are the following:

A Mgt-commerce’s benchmarking indicated that PHP 7 is more than double faster than PHP 5.6. This major improvement in speed allows web developers to create sites that provide interesting and engaging interactive features that still respond to user input as quickly as modern web users have come to expect.

According to the same test, PHP 7 is a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly choice. Compared to PHP 5.6, PHP 7 consumes 4-5 times less memory, which means that the web shop needs much less hardware resources and energy for the same amount of visitors.

Furthermore, if you are starting to pique your curiosity and your mind is already imaging which are the next steps to follow to get this jewel of coding, we can inform you that Magento 2 supports PHP 7 out of the box, if, on the other hand, you still have Magento 1, you need to implement patches to enable PHP 7 and take advantage of all the most important updates of the PHP such as faster page loading times, higher search engine ranking and of course less AWS costs.

Therefore, the migration from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7 is completely advisable if you want to take the lead in your sector and perform as your best.

Migration to Magento 2

Talking about both Magento versions, a fully automated migration from Magento 1 to 2 version is not possible. To enable store operators a fast and safe transition to the upgrade, dotSource offers individual migration concepts. The migration costs can be estimated quickly and accurately through numerous Magento projects and certified Magento 2 staff.

The quality of the existing installation will be assessed by an initial code review. The amount of modules, test coverage and documentation determine decisively the efforts and costs of the migration. Customers should not be afraid of analysis, because in the end one obtains a future-proof shop on a thin installed base with performance and scalability profits.

Shopsystems’ alternatives

Actually, in our Shop systems’ Whitepaper, we give an overview of Magento as well as of its strong counterparts solutions such as Shopware and Spryker. Ultimately, all you need to know to build up your business online, reach your internationalising ambitions or just reinforce your competiveness with the migration to PHP 7.