The article was initially published in WebMeridian blog.

Have you ever owned or operated a showroom or a coffee shop?

Do you assume you need to modernise your cafe’s furnishings, make changes in design, update the colour palette, or add anything to the menu to increase client satisfaction? Without a doubt, “definitely yes” should be your response.

Similarly, upgrading is required for your digital store. If you really want to increase your sales online, you should optimize your site on a regular basis.

Why Should You Update Magento 2.3 to 2.4?

Update Magento 2.3 to 2.4, and as a result, you can take advantage of the most recent technologies and create a better shopping experience for your customers. It will aid in the acceleration of your digital commerce business and the opening of new doors. The latest Magento 2.4.2 release includes new features and significant benefits such as:

• Improved purchase approvals
• Reduced time-to-market
• Enhanced shopfront performance
• API performance has been improved.
• Administration reaction time is now faster.
• Enhanced the default search engine
• Remote storage options are supported.

End Of Support For Magento 2.3 | When Will It Happen, and What Should I Expect?

Since November 2018, we’ve been using Magento 2.3. Magento 2.4.X updates, however, have overtaken Magento 2.3, and Adobe has officially confirmed that Magento will be phased out (End Of Life). Magento’s official support for this edition will cease on September 28, 2022.

That may have you wondering what will become of Magento 2.3. What should you anticipate, and should you switch to Magento 2.4 before September? In this article, we’ll go over everything you could want to know regarding Magento 2.3’s end of support and how to update Magento 2.3 to 2.4. Let’s get started!

1. All official updates, patches, and support will be discontinued. EOL indicates that Adobe will no longer support Magento 2.3. There will be no official updates, fixes, or support for the platform. Security patches and bug fixes are also included, as are PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliance upgrades.

2. Magento Marketplace Extension Compatibility May Be Limited

In general, Magento Marketplace merchants and developers emphasize compatibility with the most recent versions of Magento. That is, they will prioritize Magento 2.4 when adding features, addressing issues, and increasing stability, among other things.

3. You Will Not Be Able To Submit Magento 2.3 Support Tickets

Not only will updates for Magento 2.3 be halted, but you will also be unable to create support tickets for this version of the Magento eCommerce platform. If you encounter an issue with your shop while using Magento 2.3, you will be on your own — you and your technical team will have to handle it without assistance from the Magento development team.

4. The documentation for Magento 2.3 will be removed from their website.

If you start having problems with your shop while running Magento 2.3, it will be far more difficult to resolve them after the EOL in September 2022. This is due to Magento’s policy of removing developer documentation from their website whenever an outdated Magento version has been deprecated.

How to Update Magento 2.3 to 2.4

• First, go over Adobe’s really comprehensive Magento 2.4 Upgrade Guide.
• Examine your technological stack to check that you’re using Magento 2.4-compatible versions (e.g. PHP, Elasticsearch, Redis, etc.). If you aren’t, you’ll need to upgrade those components before updating Magento (note: this guide just covers upgrading Magento).
• Make a list of all the modules you’re utilizing. Then, see whether there are any newer versions of those modules that are officially compatible with Magento 2.4.
• Even if a module isn’t “technically” compatible with 2.4, it could still be safe to use. In this instance, after you’ve upgraded, you’ll need to completely evaluate the operation of that module.
• Document any adjustments you’ve made (either to OOTB Magento components, modules you’re utilizing, or your own custom-built modules) if you haven’t already. It’s likely that part of this code will need to be modified to operate with 2.4, so it’s vital to understand what will be affected and what you’ll need to test.
• To see if Magento’s Upgrade Compatibility Tool is a suitable fit for your project, read up on it. Because the tool is simple to set up and use, you should be able to get a good idea of how much effort is needed in updating your project fast.
• Please keep in mind that the tool isn’t flawless and might occasionally provide false positives, so don’t rely on it alone for your upgrading. Use it as a starting point for your emphasis areas, but make sure you have skilled developers go through your modifications to fully understand what needs to be changed in order to upgrade to 2.4.
• Run the update via a few dry runs in a small setting. To do so, download the most recent version of your project’s code (if you’re using version control, establish a branch and work from there), a copy of your production database, anonymize it and then update using Composer.
• As part of this procedure, be sure to update any Magento modules you’re utilizing.
• After you’ve completed your initial upgrade locally, you should have a decent idea of which components are working well and which require improvement. You’ll need to revisit your initial strategy and make the necessary changes.
• As you refactor any code, keep upgrading/testing locally.
• Deploy the updated code into an integration environment and have your QA team test it once everything looks okay locally.
• Updating a development environment will result in site downtime, so make sure you know how long it takes to execute Magento 2.4’s upgrading scripts in your lower environments (assuming you started with anonymized production data) and schedule your maintenance window appropriately (and, of course, take backups of everything before doing any of this).

Upgrading Magento | Magento 2.4 Technical Requirements

1. Initially, it is important to install Elasticsearch, and then it is permitted to install or upgrade 2.4. Older versions of Elasticsearch like 2.x, 5.x, and 6.x are removed.
2. For installation, it is important to have a system with 2+ GB RAM.
3. Latest Apache 2.4 or Nginx 1.x web servers.
4. For the database requirement, MySQL 8.0 and MariaDB 10.4 are perfect.
5. Works better with PHP 7.4 and PHPUnit 9.0.0. Other PHP versions are not suggested.
6. Similar PHP extensions and system dependencies are needed for installation.
7. PHP cache settings can be managed by Magento 2 Developer for or streamlined installation and configuration.
8. Valid SSL certificate is required for the secure HTTPS connection.
9. Redis 5.0, Varnish 6.3.1, RabbitMQ 3.8.x technologies are integrated for page caching and session storage.
10. The Master database of Magento Commerce offers scalability benefits for Magento apps in areas including checkout, orders, and others.
11. Support for php_xdebug 2.5.x or later is optional, but suggested.

Steps to Upgrade Magento Version from 2.3.X to 2.4.X

Step 1: If you’re working on a live site, start by using the command below to put it in maintenance mode.

php bin/magento maintenance:enable

Step 2: If you’re upgrading Magento 2.4.2 on your local machine, skip the first step and grab backup composer.json using the command below.

cp composer.json composer.json.bak

Step 3: The Composer update plugin will now be installed.

composer require magento/composer-root-update-plugin=~1.0 --no-update

composer update

Step 4: After that, you must update composer.json to the most recent version.

We’re using Magento 2.4.2 in this scenario, so navigate to the Magento 2 installation root directory and run the code below.

composer require magento/product-community-edition=2.4.2 --no-update

Step 5: Execute the command below.

composer update

The completion of this process will take some time. This program will primarily download all of the necessary components and upgrade your Magento version from 2.3.x to 2.4.2. After you’ve completed the preceding steps, execute the instructions listed below.

Step 6: Clear cache and regenerate code.

php bin/magento cache:clean rm -rf var/cache/ rm -rf var/page_cache/ rm -rf generated/code/* php bin/magento setup:upgrade php bin/magento setup:di:compile php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy -f

Step 7: Last but not least, remember to turn off maintenance mode. php bin/magento maintenance:disable

That’s all, Magento 2.4.2 is now installed.

Magento 2.4.3: Release Notes | Benefits and Features for Merchants

Close remote code execution (RCE) and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities are addressed in the 2.4.3 version, which contains 33 security updates and platform security upgrades.

The Adobe Commerce 2.4.3 release package includes a new composer plugin that helps prevent security concerns, often known as dependency confusion.

Rate restriction is built-in to the Magento API to avoid denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. It also offers the ability to limit the size of Web API resources. 20 is the default value.

With Magento 2.4.3, the reCAPTCHA coverage has been expanded.

Changes to Infrastructure

The framework’s quality has improved as a result of improvements in the majority of the following functional areas:

• Customer Account
• Catalog
• CMS
• OMS
• Import/Export
• Promotions and Targeting
• Cart and Checkout
• B2B
• Staging and Preview PayPal Pay Later is also supported in Magento 2.4.3 for online businesses that take PayPal payments.

Optimisation in Performance

Product Price and Catalogue Rule indexers benefit from improvements that minimize indexing time. Magento’s merchants may now delete a website for a specific client group with this new edition. This allows for a large reduction in the amount of indexing records and an improvement in indexing time.

Enhancements in Partner’s Ecosystem

Vendor-developed extensions and third-party extensions benefit from the following features in Magento 2.4.2:

• Braintree has recently enabled the ability to ship to multiple addresses.
• Amazon Purchase: The ability to pay using Amazon Pay has been removed from the updated version.
• Vertex: It eliminates outdated code and improves the admin experience and backend interface.
• dotdigital: This partner’s engagement cloud model now includes diagnostic warnings and Page Builder.
• Yotpo: The order synchronization system has seen an enhancement.
• Klarna: It now has a GraphQL module that can integrate with PWAs.

Tools and Integrations Have Been Improved

The following features and integrations have been improved in the Magento platform’s latest release:

• PWO studio: It has greater localization and internationalization, various payment and language support, and extensibility, among other things.
• Unions, multiple wish lists, RMA, comparison lists, and much more are all supported by GraphQL.
• It includes new role resources capabilities to prevent unauthorized admin access to the media gallery. Merchants can also include photographs that have been optimized for the web in their material.
• Page Builder: It now offers better CSS customization and content development in Page Builder. The updated version further improves the inline experience.
• Support for object storage and potential extensions have been added to Amazon Simple Storage Service (AWS S3). It may also be used to store media files.

Final Keywords on How to Upgrade to Magento 2.4

Before beginning an update Magento 2.3 to 2.4, make sure you understand what’s required and have a strategy in place. Make sure your Magento shop is patched with the latest security upgrades for your version, at the very least.

Upgrading may be difficult, and we don’t recommend doing it on your own. Let us know if you’re running Magento 2.3 and aren’t sure what to do next, or if you’ve begun an upgrade to 2.4 but are stuck.

We’d be delighted to speak with you to see how we can assist.