For the past month I have been working on developing for Magento 2. One of the biggest reason why is because of what the sales person said on how fast and secure it is. During my own tests I have found Magento 2 to be a joke!

Maybe when a newer version comes out it will be better, but right now, it is riddled with bugs. If you are thinking about going to Magento 2, STOP RIGHT NOW. It is not ready for prime time. Plus I have not found one BIG merchant who uses it. They are still all using Magento 1.9 or Magento 1.14. Magento will stop supporting version 1 at the end of 2018, but I feel like this may be extended until they fix the issues with Magento 2.

Anyway, here are some reasons why not to use Magento 2 at its current state.

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

Currently on the magento2 GitHub page there are over 1,500 Bugs Reported. and about 700 of the are acknowledged bugs (See Screenshot below). Granted, it is to be expected to have some bugs. Look at the Laravel Framework. It has 74 Issues at the time of writing this. You will probably fine most of those issues are not big bugs though compared to Magento 2.

Super Slow

Magento 2 is also very slow without caching turned on. I was running tests on a machine with 16GB of RAM and 8 CPU cores. Running PHP 7.0.15 (tried PHP 7.1.1 as well) with Apache 2.4.6. Page speed without caching in developer mode is 12-30 seconds.

Caching on, it is a bit better, however, not great. With caching on without FPC, it is about 3 seconds to load home page, and about 9-18 seconds for the admin pages. With FPC on, we do see page loads as low as 150ms on the home page, with default settings right after an install. That is great, after you do the first load which is about 3 seconds for the application. This is also not talking about other things such as the DOM load. This is only measuring the application first byte response.

More Bugs

After doing a fresh install, I am unable to make edits in the admin. I go to Content > Elements > Pages and I get nothing (see screenshot below). Why? I am unsure, but I was getting these errors in the log:

main.CRITICAL: Broken reference: the 'header' tries to reorder itself towards 'global.notices', but their parents are different: 'page.wrapper' and 'notices.wrapper' respectively.
main.CRITICAL: Broken reference: the 'page.breadcrumbs' tries to reorder itself towards 'notifications', but their parents are different: 'page.wrapper' and 'notices.wrapper' respectively.
main.CRITICAL: Broken reference: the 'global.search' tries to reorder itself towards 'notification.messages', but their parents are different: 'header.inner.right' and 'header' respectively.

Searching throughout the internet I tried everything. I do not have any JS errors. I’ve even tried changing permissions to 777. I think the main fix might have to be to re-upload the files. That’s always fun to do.

Other issues such as I can not add products nor add categories. I can’t edit pages or blocks. The system is pretty useless at this point. I am unable to utilize Magento 2.

Enterprise Pricing

I used to be all about the Magento Enterprise Model. I thought that version was a lot better and a lot more stable. However, their pricing has changed to a revenue sharing model? Why? Because all the big wigs are doing it now-a-days. But guess what Magento, the other big wigs are doing it right, you are doing it wrong. For example, Shopify has a RevShare Model, however, they host your site. They handle most of the issues and problems. Whenever i try and get support, it is always, send us a data dump and we will get back with you. They send me a patch, I apply, it makes things worse, and have to send another data dump. This ends up being never ending.

Conclusion

I am done with Magento right now. Maybe they can win me back, I don’t know. But right now, they are not looking good. I have spent so much time trying to get it to run fast, and I have made great accomplishments with Magento 1. I have 4 Magento v1 websites running multi-million dollar ecommerce businesses. Home page loads in 100ms. Category pages loads between 400ms to 2 seconds, depending on if a filter is selected. Product Pages with thousands of configurable products load between 300ms to 1.5 seconds. Thanks to a re-write I made that allowed for selecting of color swatches and sizes through an AJAX JSON request.

That’s my rant for today. As always you can leave a comment or use any social network

~Joshua