Magento 1 EOL - Migrate to Magento 2

Magento, the popular ecommerce platform has moved on from Magento 1 (M1) to Magento 2 (M2). If you own a Magento 1 e-commerce Store, you must consider moving along and upgrading Magento to the latest version to maximise on the changes and improvements that the newer platform offers and to protect your online store from the pitfalls of the earlier major release. Here are some timelines and details of the platform to help you make this decision better.

Strengths of Magento 2

Superior Performance

Magento 2 performs better than Magento 1 in all use cases. It comes with an enhanced indexer that helps increase its query performance speed. It has proven to show increases in server response time, database flexibility and scalability to handle peak loads. Magento v2 supports Varnish Cache out of the box.

Responsive, Mobile-friendly

Online purchases made from mobile devices continue to draw record-breaking revenue making sure none of the web platforms can ignore this device as a medium for consumption. Magento 2’s responsive frontend design gives that edge enhancing user experience and making it search engine friendly.

A modern Intuitive Admin Interface

Magento 1 Admin is criticised as being unfriendly and M2’s new admin interface has an infinitely improved interface with its vertical toolbar, ajax loading, expanding filters and simplistic intuitive categorisation of content making it easier for the admin user to access resources and navigate. It also boasts a comprehensive dashboard, shows lifetime sales, last orders, average orders, top search terms, revenue tax, check bestsellers & customers, shipping, and quantity. This helps to monitor the current state of your business.

Better User Experience features

M2 has a new streamlined checkout experience and an ajax `Add to cart` feature, ensuring a smoother path to checkout for the web customer to complete the purchase in the Store.

Architectural Overhaul

Magento 2 boasts of a brand new architecture, coding structure, and database design. Magento 2 supports advanced technologies such as CSS3, HTML5 for theming.. It uses JQuery instead of prototype.js. Magento 2 also is equipped with two fully responsive blank themes “Blank” and “Luma”. Magento 2.3 also boasts of Progressing Web Apps and GraphQL.

With an improved testing framework, Magento 2 enables developers to automatically test the generated functionality.

Magento 2 Enterprise Edition, the paid version of Magento, offers split data solution for Product, Orders and Checkout , avoiding Database Overload . ElasticSearch is also now included in Magento 2 Enterprise edition.

Multi-source Inventory

Magento 2.3, the latest version has Multi-source Inventory in its core codebase which helps merchants improve operational efficiency by managing inventory across multiple physical locations from within the Magento admin.

Pitfalls of continuing in Magento 1

Software security patches/updates for Magento 1 ends as of June 2020

For Magento E-Commerce Stores built on Magento Community Edition 1.5 to 1.9, Magento will provide software security patches only through June 2020. Software security patches are a critical requirement for sites to remain secure. There might be an increase in the number of malicious software that target vulnerabilities discovered after the release of the last security patches. It is very important to migrate the software before then.

PHP 5.6 End of Life in Dec 2018

Magento 1 Ecommerce Platform is written on PHP, a Server Side scripting Language. PHP 5.6 reached EOL in December 2018. Magento has released a security patch for an upgrade to PHP 7.2 for Core Magento 1 , which can be found here. This is probably something all Magento 1 sites must do immediately until they migrate to Magento 2.

PHP 7.2 will enhance the performance and add new features to Magento 2.3. It also enhances security.

Magento Commerce 1.x PCI Compliance

Magento Commerce 1.x software will be unsupported by Magento and sites using unsupported Magento version will no longer be PCI compliant.

I am a Magento 1 merchant. What should I do?

Find your current Magento version

Find what is your current Magento version, this helps you determine where you stand. You can find this in the Admin Panel in the footer.

Timeline – Don’t miss the Bus

Use this opportunity to upgrade your e-commerce store as if you would upgrade your normal brick and mortar store periodically. In a digital age, where security is of highest relevance, this is not something to be stashed out, but to be assessed immediately.

Support for Magento 1 Open Source and Magento Commerce  ends June 2020. A successful approach to migrate to Magento 2 will be to plan for when the new website would need to be live prior to June 2020 and work backward to know when you should get started with aplenty of buffer-time for the unexpected.

Plan sufficient time for development

Development of the new platform needed for migration can take two or months, so with June 2020 as the finite deadline, be sure to budget sufficient time for the developer team you select to do the work methodically, and not hastily.

Understanding what is involved in a migration

A Magento site typically consists of:

Core Magento Code
Any Marketplace extensions added on to the core
Themes overlayed on the site
Specific business related customisations tailored in
Data that the site operates on

A migration would involve not just migrating the Magento core, but also these other moving parts of the system and the data on which the site operates on.

For the additional systems woven around the core code of Magento, it is a good time to decide what needs to be moved forward and what needs to be left behind. Though the effort sounds weary and daunting, the benefits will justify the effort involved. It will help to start early and pace the process.

Endertech is a Los Angeles Web Developer able to provide solutions for your Magento and other Ecommerce development needs. Contact us for your free consultation.