will mark the end of Magento 1 support. And this time it’s for real. As you know, Magento dev team has already announced the end of life for Magento 1 to be November 2018 but then they decided to extend the support period because of how many merchants were not ready to migrate anytime soon.
All these M1 stores need security patches during the preparation and transition period. Magento team understands that and wants to give merchants as much time to move as possible. Yet the team needs to concentrate all resources on M2 development. And to do that they have to abandon Magento 1.9.x.
Why Store Owners Don’t Want to Migrate?
When we talk with our potential customers about the need to migrate, they all agree that it’s a good idea and they should be doing it. And yet they don’t. Why?
Well we’ve found 3 main reasons why store owners don’t rush to migrate their stores right away:
- merchants fear the cost of migration,
- they don’t fully understand why they need to move right now,
- they want things to “just work” and fear change.
All of these are legitimate reasons and need to be addressed. A few years ago we didn't want to push people to upgrade if they were not ready yet. But this time it’s different. It’s time to act. It’s 2020 and Magento 1 is almost obsolete.
Poor understanding of costs. You can’t start a big project without a clear understanding of costs and expenses. This is a huge challenge for store owners since most stores are heavily customized and feature dozens of third-party extensions and integrations.
The only way to tackle this fear is to get a detailed estimate from an experienced Magento team. When you know what kind of resources you need to invest, suddenly this problem stops being a problem and transforms into a project.
Good M1 performance. It’s so cool when everything goes as planned. Business is booming, your customers are happy, your store is popular and fast.
What else could you want? Well, for starters, it’s dangerous to stop moving forward. Stagnation is a real threat in the vibrant world of online retail. If today you are good, it doesn’t mean tomorrow it’ll be the same.
Move with the times. Think a few steps ahead. Magento 1 works for now but what happens when the support ends? You are left with a stagnating platform. Your development costs rise because of how difficult it is to find experienced M1 developers and good third-party extensions.
Your hosting opportunities are also limited if you rely on Magento hosting providers to setup and maintain your server environment for you.Sometimes the cost of not doing anything can be as high (or higher!) as upgrading the store to M2.
Fear of change. New is scary. Old is what is familiar, what’s safe. People fear change even if it’s good for them. Sometimes this force is so powerful inside the company that it’s hard to overcome. Make sure that you as a business owner understand what drives you forward and what holds you back. It can be a legitimate concern but sometimes it’s just a fear of change itself.
Reason 1. No More Security Patches
E-commerce platform statistics can be all over the place but there are on the Internet. Would you like to take a wild guess how many of them are running on Magento 1.x instead of Magento 2.x?
More than a half.
Now imagine all of these stores lose the ability to get new security updates in one go. Overnight they become one of the most profitable targets for hackers and scammers from all over the world.
This is because any new vulnerability that hackers find from now on will never be officially patched. It will stay with the store forever, making it vulnerable to the same exploit again and again.
E-commerce is already one of the most profitable targets of online crime. And Magento 1 stores are just too many to not be specifically targeted by hackers (see our or get a ).
Hackers are not always going for the money. Among other attacks are store defacing, injecting your site with malware to infect customer computers, making your store a part of their DDoS or mail spam botnet, establishing a backdoor for future use, hosting illegal content, etc.
Reason 2. Crippling Data Leak Fines
Lack of security leads to data leaks. And e-commerce sites have a lot of data that hackers are interested in. Among the most frequent attack targets are stolen CC data and personal customer info. Let’s take a closer look at the possible consequences:
- Leak of CC information will lead to large, potentially crippling fines from Visa, MasterCard, and other payment processors. Depending on the damage done, fines can be as high as $100,000+ or more. There is no upper limit to how much money it can .
In addition, payment processors such as Stripe will freeze your merchant account during the investigation period further damaging your bottom line.
- Customers’ personal data is another major attack target that can lead to loss of business reputation and potential lawsuits. Being on the receiving end of the litigation process is not a fun experience. GDPR laws protecting customers’ personal data use are strict and lead to significant fines – up to €20 million or 4% of the total company turnover.
Reason 3. Lack of New Functionality
Magento 1.9.x is the final version of Magento 1. So in addition to security patches, Magento 1 stopped receiving new feature updates as well. Lack of new functionality in a changing and highly competitive e-commerce environment is a huge setback.
Even though you can easily supplement most features with third-party extensions, in the future it will be harder and harder to find new stuff: independent developers are not going to stick around for long. After all, no one is looking forward to get stuck on a stagnating platform.
New extensions will get released for Magento 2, making M1 a desolate and lonely place. Today Magento 2 default functionality gets updated with PWA capabilities, complex warehouse management tools, and other awesome features that will never come to Magento 1. Ever.
Reason 4. Subsequent Technological Lapse
The development and server environment is moving forward, too. Right now your hosting provider has to support dozens of configurations to ensure that every website and store runs on its recommended software.
This includes outdated PHP and MySQL versions, certain modules and solutions that are out of date or no longer supported by the development team. Even though right now it might not seem like a huge deal to you, as time goes on you will notice that your hosting provider will also urge you to move to a more recent server environment.
Reason 5. Raise of Development and Support Costs
The effort to maintain an aging environment and platform is something you have to keep in mind all the time. As new technologies replace old ones, you will find it harder and harder to find skilled developers that are willing to work on an outdated project using an outdated technology stack.
Right now, Magento 1 might seem pretty recent but further down the road, and especially next year when the official support ends, Magento 1 will feel older every day.
Why Upgrade to Magento 2?
For those of you who are on the fence about the migration issue, we want to give our top 5 reasons to migrate now so you can have all the info you need to make an informed decision.
What does end of support exactly mean? What are other implications of staying with Magento 1? Will the support and development cost rise for merchants who don’t want to migrate? We give honest answers to these pressing questions and offer our reasons to speed up your migration plans instead of putting them off for later.
Every year the gap between the two platforms is only getting wider. Upon the initial release, Magento 2.0 received a lot of criticism for bad optimization, slow development, and lack of features. After 5 years of active development, Magento 2 has already become as functional as Magento 1.You can expect to get even more features at least twice a year when major Magento 2 releases get live. Even now there are a lot of benefits you get from a swift migration:
Improved security. Magento 2 will obviously get all the attention of the security team. After June 2020 all their resources will go directly to Magento 2 patches. They will no longer need to divide attention between Magento 1 and Magento 2 platforms. Expect to see even more frequent and substantial security updates: the security landscape calls for faster releases and more frequent fixes of critical vulnerabilities.
Built-in integrations. Magento 2 natively supports tools that used to be ignored by Magento 1. For example, it’s much easier to build in ElasticSearch and Varnish into your M2 store. There are countless integrations with payment gateways that have poor Magento 1 support.
New Admin Panel features. Magento 2 backend not only looks better, it works better as well:
- new data safeguards to help multiple users work on the same content simultaneously,
- native video embedding capabilities,
- reworked Admin Panel UX and menu logic,
- step-by-step New Product menu,
- improvements to grid view for products.
Better Checkout. Throughout its lifetime, Magento 1 had to deal with a sluggish and complicated Checkout process. Magento 2 team managed to rethink how Checkout should work. They made it faster and simpler. Getting a better Checkout experience is well worth upgrading. Faster Checkout = more conversions and sales.
SEO improvements. Magento 1 gets bad rap for how it handles SEO – especially how it handles duplicate content and meta tags. Magento dev team learned their lesson and later made a lot of improvements in how Magento 2 deals with duplicate content. It has become more consistent, Google-friendly, and just easier to deal with (see how to improve it even further ).
Magento 2 , too. They are now present on all product pages natively (no need to use SEO extensions). Magento 2 SEO is mobile-friendly which means your store will rank higher for smartphone users. New and updated extensions. There are 5,722 third-party extensions on Magento Marketplace and this number is constantly growing. New extensions and themes get released or updated on a daily basis. But what about Magento 1 extensions? There are still 2,050 of M1 extensions and themes on the Marketplace. Do they get the same amount of attention? Nope.
Got bugs or long-promised features for your favorite extension? Not a chance it will ever get updated again. You are basically stuck with what you have. On the other hand, Magento 2 has 30% wider selection of themes and extensions.
Basic analytics inclusion. Magento 2 built in a Dashboard view that adds multiple sales metrics to the main page of your store. Here you can see top selling products, top searches, average check, and other interesting metrics. Compared to a real business intelligence tool, this is extremely basic functionality but it helps store owners understand the value of more powerful business intelligence tools and how they can help them grow their sales.
More feature updates. Over the last 5 years, Magento 2 got 50 feature updates and countless hotfixes and security patches. If you compare that to Magento 1 updates, you’ll see that M1 saw only 17 releases during 2015-2020.
Magento optimizations. Magento 2 does not pile everything into the same database as Magento 1 did. Separate small databases work faster than one huge database.
Same goes for Add to Cart functionality. When you add something in Magento 1 store, the whole page has to reload to show the changes. Magento 2 does that with AJAX on the fly. Great UX improvement.
One of the most impressive features is multi-server load spread mechanics which helps spread out the workload during spikes in traffic. In addition to that, Magento 2 has better PHP7 support. It’s also optimized for faster content handling – product creation and editing is way faster here.
We have already created a to help you estimate your migration costs. Also, take a look at our Magento 2 pricing guide to see how much it will cost you to run the new store on a daily basis.
Should I Upgrade to Magento 2 Now?
To answer this question, you have to understand how migrating to Magento 2 will affect your business and how much will it cost.
Answer these questions:
- Is your store profitable and has a high conversion rate? Magento 2 offers improved and simplified Checkout steps, on-the-go Add to Cart functionality, more third-party extensions, and scale improvements that are missing from Magento 1.
- Do you lack any features that Magento 1 doesn’t have? Magento 1 is a long-established platform with plenty of extensions, themes, and ready-to-use solutions that you can implement right away. Unfortunately, core Magento will not receive new features after 2020. In addition to that, Magento extension developers will not update their products to add new features. Your only alternative is developing the required functionality yourself.
- Will you migrate to Magento 2 eventually? Most businesses will move to Magento 2, they just want to delay this move. Why? Lots of reasons. But you have to understand that staying with Magento 1 is going to cost you a lot of money. It’s cheaper to migrate sooner rather than later.
- Does your store design look dated? Design patterns move with the time. What used to be trendy and cool 5 years ago screams DATED right now. In online retail staying behind can hurt your sales. Users constantly compare your store with dozens of others. And if your design is old, your store will lose this silent competition. And eventually this will cost you in lost sales.
- Are you satisfied with your store’s performance? The illusion of stability was the downfall of a lot of successful businesses. Even if you don’t see the changes, something is happening all the time. New stores get open, old stores get closed. New trends appear and capture the market. Business landscape is never static. Move with the times.
- Do you want to implement new features in the future? It’s not a good business decision to keep investing in an old store that you will have to abandon in a few years anyway. Consider investing that money into your new Magento 2 store which will be much more future-proof.
- Do you feel concerned about your store and payment data security? You should be. Magento 1 is now more secure, less buggy, and more predictable than Magento 2. Sadly, the focus of the community is long gone and is now on Magento 2. M1 gets less attention every year which means less bug fixes, worse security, more liability for you as a business that handles customer data.
If you’ve answered YES to any of these questions, it’s better to upgrade sooner rather than later. The longer you wait, the more expensive it becomes. You get fewer developers who offer Magento 1 support, less hosting options for stores that need older PHP versions, more security liabilities, etc.
The duration of your migration will heavily depend on:
- the number of extensions,
- design and theme requirements,
- additional features,
- third-party extensions,
- the number of store views.
Invest in the move now to be ready for the June 2020 changes in time. Mitigate large data leak and credit card fines with a timely upgrade from an outdated platform.
Get our to examine all possible challenges and prepare for the migration. Also check out this brief overview to find out what businesses need to know before starting the project.
Hard to start alone? Want a dependable team to ensure your migration goes fast and according to plan? Let’s see how Onilab team can help you migrate in an efficient and timely manner. to discuss your project challenges with the experts in and .