Magento 1 is Nearing its End, What Could Be Your Old Store’s Fate?

With Magento 1.9x in its final moments, online retailers and advertisers are hastening their efforts for Magento 2 Migration to rejuvenate their stores and embrace the future of ecommerce. Being an online merchant, understanding the extreme importance of a faster, more advanced, and user-friendly platform is crucial to your store’s lifeline. While many merchants have begun understanding its necessity, some struggle in acknowledging its core value propositions against Magento 1.9x. Others have either cold feed in embracing the new platform, or feel reluctant migrating their older versions to the new one, given the time consumption and inconvenience of the process. In this article we will share a detailed overview on why Migrating your old store to Magento 2 is the soundest and safest move for your Magento website.

1. Security Breach

After the latest patch release date, Magento announced that 1.9x versions will no longer receive official security patches or support. With no more protection from Magento, failing to migrate to the Magento 2 will leave the store highly vulnerable to hacking and malware attacks. With no layers to protect your website, any breach of security can easily comprise all your valuable data and spiral into a costly catastrophe.

2. Risk of Malfunction

Vendors and developers associated with Magento 1.9x modules will also halt their support increasing the risk of extension malfunctioning after June. Since most extensions development companies have already initiated their transition phase, many products such as modules, plugins and themes will no longer function properly. If there is a bug issue, or a security patch missing in your M1 extension, you will be at a significant risk of losing your store function, credibility and a whole lot of trust from your buyer.

3. Time is of the Essence

A key reason to consider migrating your store now is because time if of the essence. As we already know that Magento 2 will stop sending updates to 1.9x versions by June, it only leaves merchants with a little more than 3 months to comply. Having said that, the migration process takes around 3-6 months which includes a complete rebuild of the existing site. Moreover, factoring in other custom integrations and technical delays, the process can further stretch. Therefore, doing it now is the only way to prevent any haphazard performance. With FME, you can get tailored Magento migration solutions, with zero data loss and 100% delivery within deadlines.

Magento 2 Migration Benefits

Superior Architecture

Being a superior ecommerce architecture, Magento 2 boasts a stronger open source framework featuring PHP 5.6+/7 with HTML5 & CSS3 Native Support. This gives a significant competitive edge against Magento 1.9x version and other platforms that have older architectures. Older versions often start breaking sweat during mass orders and heavy duty functionalities, which the Magento team has completely fixed in 2x versions.

Improved Performance

Magento 2 brings a massive performance upgrade. With its latest update, Magento 2 runs 20% faster than Magento 1 through its improved caching system. This means pages load within 1-2 seconds compared to 5-10 seconds of non-caching pages. Magento 2 store can easily handle multiple catalog pages and still run at its benchmark speeds. This gives it an additional edge on mobile devices where pages have to be highly scalable for larger stores as it could decide if the customer will convert or not.

Features for Modern Commerce

A major problem with Magento 1.9x was it missed some key functionalities that were essential for modern commerce. Magento 2 is now equipped with some awesome new B2C and B2B functionalities, such as advanced payment methods including Paypal, WorldPay, and Cybersource. Its intuitive checkout process makes online purchasing more streamlined than ever, with minimum fields, maximum payment security, and instant purchase feature that stores previously entered credential and shipping details of the customer. This helps avoid re-entering the same information to complete another purchase from the same store. With these upgrades, Magento 2 now boasts 28% more orders an hour, 66% faster add-to card, and 48% faster checkout response time.

Cross-Platform Experience

One of the biggest advantages of Magento 2 is its mobile responsive capabilities. Magento 2 is highly mobile friendly and supports all types of mobile platforms and browsers frameworks. In contrast to previous versions that slightly underperformed in this area, the Magento team recognized the key issues and invested huge effort and time to make it the best cross-platform experience. This also helped improve admin panel interface, allowing merchants to manage their store operations even while on the go.

SEO Friendly

Magento 2 wins by a huge margin when it comes to SEO. It comes with several key features for digital marketing that allows webmasters to optimize their digital footprint without any additional extensions.

• Canonical tags to prevent content duplicity
• XML sitemaps for adding additional information about each URL
• Alt product images for ranking your visual content
• Robot txt file for preventing certain areas or pages of site from being indexed
• Meta descriptions, title and keywords for products and categories
• Search friendly URLs for better visibility

Summary on Improved Features

Magento 2 is a fully loaded platform that offers better performance, scalability, usability, responsiveness and SEO functionalities. Here is a quick summary on how it takes lead against Magento 1.9x and other ecommerce platforms.

• 20% faster than older versions and 50% faster on mobile devices
• More reliable code, with the ability to extend native core functionalities
• Highly optimized, streamlined, and flexible interface
• Amazing cross-platform experience from any platform or device
• Ability to manage larger volumes of daily orders and SKUs

Merchant Benefits

• Advanced staging features for content with fully customizable data grid
• Ability assign price lists and custom catalogs to customers
• Allows merchants to target content based for selective customer segments
• Automation features for reduce fulfilment costs and improve delivery time
• Mobile responsive admin panel for smoother experience
• Advanced options for uploading CSVs and entering SKUs

Customer Benefits

• Comes with elastic search and improved navigation functions
• More scalable and smoother user-experience on mobile devices
• Being more SEO-friendly helps customer find pages more effectively
• Robust security features prevent compromising of customer data
• Instant checkout to help customer repeat purchase without entering data