Adobe has announced a major upgrade to Adobe Commerce. With Adobe Commerce 2.4.4, e-commerce leaders now have access to superior performance and enhanced security features.
As the Adobe Digital Experience Emerging Partner of the Year, Hero Digital is excited to utilize the latest features of Adobe Commerce to create meaningful e-commerce experiences. We invite you to meet with one of our experts to discuss the benefits of upgrading to Adobe Commerce 2.4.4.
Adobe Commerce empowers business leaders to create multi-channel commerce experiences for both B2B and B2C customers on a single platform.
Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 provides superior performance and enhanced security features that help business leaders deliver an excellent e-commerce experience to their customers. The full list of enhancements can be found in the Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 release notes, but here’s an overview of the key features.
Key Features of Adobe Commerce 2.4.4
PHP 8.1 Support
PHP is the scripting language used to customize Adobe Commerce Modules, Themes, and Language packages. PHP 8.1 is a major upgrade of the PHP language and provides many new features that enhance your ability to customize and protect your site.
Removal of Vendor-Bundled Extensions
Prior Adobe Commerce versions contained a number of commonly used vendor extensions. In 2.4.4, all vendor extensions (apart from Braintree) have been removed to improve performance and simplify support.
Previously bundled extensions are still available from the Adobe Commerce Extensions Marketplace. Performance issues and “bugs” in extensions can be addressed quickly, without the need to wait for an Adobe patch, hot fix, or release.
Security Enhancements
A number of enhancements have been made to harden your site against unauthorized access or attack:
- Additional protections on customer information and admin hijacking
- Enhanced protection of emails, newsletters, and templates
- Additional security options and protection for integrations, which add further protection for applications connected to Adobe Commerce.
- reCAPTCHA support for coupon codes: protects your coupons from bots, scraping services and other abuse.
- HTTPS and secure cookies enabled by default
- Limits on the size of arrays accepted by specific RESTful endpoints for further protection against bots and other abusers seeking to steal data and bog down your site.
Improved Search Capabilities
Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 provides support for the latest versions of Elasticsearch v7.16 and OpenSearch 1.2. OpenSearch is the only search engine option for cloud deployments. On-prem deployments may use either solution.
Performance Enhancements
Providing a superior checkout experience is a huge theme for Adobe Commerce 2.4.4. These enhancements include:
- Asynchronous orders feature – provides the ability to support up to 60,000 orders per hour. This is a 6x increase over previous versions! This feature makes it possible to support “flash sales” and keep your site humming on Black Friday and other high-volume periods.
- Enable Inventory Check On Cart Load – Gives you the flexibility to choose when inventory checks are performed to keep the quote and checkout processes humming.
- Cart operations – Gives your customers the ability to manage carts containing 750+ configurable products.
- Sales Rules Optimization – Previously, sales rules were processed every time a customer adds an item to their cart. 2.4.4 gives you the ability to defer this process as needed to accelerate checkout.
Enhanced GraphQL Support
GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It helps you obtain data from source systems quickly and efficiently.
Adobe Commerce 2.4.4 provides a variety of enhancements that help you use GraphQL to increase the efficiency and performance of your site:
- Updated GraphQL Library – The webonyx library has been upgraded to v14.9
- Negotiable Quotes – GraphQL can now be used in both negotiation flows AND checkout. The checkout portion is important because customers may choose to use slightly different information (e.g. billing/shipping address, payment methods, shipping carriers, etc.) at checkout than listed on the quote. This gives you the ability to lock down important attributes but provides flexibility where appropriate.
- CDN Caching – GraphQL requests can now be cached within Fastly and Varnish, which reduces response time and improves cart operations.
Upgrade Now
It’s a perfect time to upgrade to Adobe Commerce 2.4.4. The beta version was released in October 2021 and became available for pre-release in March 2022. The general release occurred on April 12, 2022, so the kinks and bugs have largely been addressed and the risks are minimized.
Previous versions of Adobe Commerce (and PHP versions) are running out of shelf life. The end-of-support dates for recent versions are:
- Adobe Commerce 2.3: Software support ceases on September 8, 2022
- Adobe Commerce 2.4.0 – 2.4.3: Support ceases on November 28, 2022
Work with the Adobe Experts
Hero Digital has the Adobe Commerce expertise you need to upgrade your site to 2.4.4 quickly and efficiently. Our Adobe Commerce practice was established in 2010, and we’ve successfully completed over 500 e-commerce projects.
Our engineers and staff are certified by Adobe, and we’re currently engaged in assisting many of our clients with the 2.4.4 upgrade. Our powerful partnership with Adobe and digital experience expertise ensure a successful upgrade and future success.
We invite you to schedule a quick call with one of our Adobe experts to start the upgrade process.
