Today, thousands of e-commerce businesses use Magento 1.x with immense success, and upgrading for them is not a very urgent matter, but an excellent opportunity – so should all e-commerce businesses upgrade to Magento 2.0 now?
Even though Magento 2 has been around a long time – it was announced in 2010 and a beta version was made available in 2015 – most owners of e-commerce businesses are still most possibly wondering whether they should upgrade to Magento current version and if it’s worth it.
By talking about Magento 1 vs Magento 2, we will look at various significant factors and help them make the right decision.
What is Magento 1.x?
Magento 1.x is rich in features and powers store owners to make better use of its built-in features any way they want to manage their stores.
Some useful features of Magento 1.x include powerful marketing tools, optimization of search engines, catalog management, etc.
Besides its obvious benefit of letting business owners manage their stores, customer data, and inventory, Magento 1.x versions are getting slowly out-dated due to new improvements.
Right now, there are some disadvantages to Magento 1.9, such as:
- Magento 1.9 is developed like a Java application, but its codebase is formulated in PHP. Most of the issues with the older version are a consequence of operating PHP. The Magento application can spend gigabytes of RAM during complicated processes, and PHP often honestly cannot handle the load, despite the hardware is thrown at it.
- The older version tends to be slow, especially on smaller, single servers.
- The learning curve of Magento 1.9 is pretty steep if you aren’t accustomed to OOP/Java, or if you don’t know the PHP Zend Framework very well.
- Due to its size, Magento 1.x should only be hosted on a dedicated server and should be configured by experts who are trained in Magento hosting. Operating Magento 1.x on normal shared hosting will produce a frustrating and slow user experience for customers.
What is Magento 2.0?
Magento 2 brings critical changes in the widely-used platform. Besides overall enhancements in functions, major improvements in the technology, modularity (both frontend and backend) and performance have been made.
Clearly, Magento wants to unify Magento 2 and increase its functionality, making it more appealing, specifically for bigger businesses.
New features are being constantly added to the system every three months by the original developers at Magento.
☛ Magento 2 vs Magento 1—When Should Do You Upgrade?
If until now, your Magento 1 is running smoothly without any problems, generating revenue and orders and operates under a version not yet out-dated, then at least for some months more, there is no deadline to upgrade to Magento 2.
However, if you are already planning long-term and thinking far ahead, you should start planning to hire Magento developer urgently if
- You are noticing performance issues in your e-commerce store
- You are planning to start a new e-commerce store
- You are planning to enforce bigger modifications
- Your current system is working perfectly but on an outdated version
It is worth updating even if your version is still working fine because Magento 2 provides a selection of new innovation, opportunities, and features that can make serving customers and help you grow your business in ways unavailable until now.
We will talk about the difference between Magento 1 and 2 soon.
☛ Challenges of Migrating Your Store to Magento 2
There are obvious obstacles to upgrading and migrating from one version to another is never painless, unless of course if you are migrating between two versions of the same systems. You can transfer databases, attributes or products seamlessly from Magento 1 to Magento 2. However, when you do migrate, you will have to let go of all the customized design and features behind—but this is easily remedied if you hire Magento Development Services who will have the expertise to guide you.
It is a great opportunity to migrate and here are some reasons why:
- There are useless features in your store
- You want to add features that have been missing for a long time
- You want to improve your online store anyway
Furthermore, migration won’t be too big of an issue with the Data Migration tool, which will make migrating order, customer, and product data easier.
☛ Magento Development and the Community Factor
Despite being around since 2015, Magento 2 is still considered a new platform. The main reason behind this could be the small number of developers who have enough experience in Magento 2 development and installing extensions. Still, the professional community behind Magento is huge. They are professionals who have been learning about and working on all the versions before Magento 2 for almost a decade, thus they are knowledgeable enough to solve issues better and faster than others. Even though GitHub is used to develop the core, developers still work on patches and features on a daily basis.
10 Reasons Why You Must Migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2:
Magento 2.0 comes with several improvements, namely in the areas of user experience, coding, and functionality.
Here are some key difference between Magento 1 and Magento 2:
☛ Enhanced Performance and Scalability
According to experts, e-commerce websites should not load for more than 3 seconds or increase more than 3 MB, otherwise, you risk losing a massive chunk of your traffic.
Magento 2 loading time is faster than the regular 2-3 seconds. The product pages, homepage, and category page load in less than 1.5 seconds without the application of frontend caching even.
☛ Streamlined Checkout
With the current, integrated checkout, checkout has become faster and easier for customers.
Unregistered customers can also check out now while registered ones are easily identified by Magento 2 based on their email addresses alone.
The option to register after checkout has been added and its process has been simplified greatly.
☛ Elasticsearch
Due to Elastisearch, the quality of user experience and searches has been improved in Magento. It handles 33 languages already and core Magento developers are obviously going to depend on Elastisearch more in the future.
☛ Ajax Add-to-cart
It negatively affects your business when the page takes a long time to load, especially when adding items to the cart in Magento 1.
Sometimes, pages may lag when more than one item is added to cart on stores running on Magento 1.x.
This can lead to customers abandoning their carts. For instance, if you are selling smaller value items or if your customers mostly shop for more than one item on your store, this delay of seconds is an issue you cannot disregard.
Due to the Ajax add-to-cart in the current version, the system does not need to reload the whole page when more than one item is added to the cart.
☛ Simpler Navigation
Admin navigation is modernized and simplified in Magento 2—users with minimal experience also can manage their stores efficiently.
Most store owners with Magento 1 do find the admin interface slightly complicated and only those with prior experience with the sophisticated interface can navigate without breaking a sweat.
Thus, this new admin interface is simpler and a welcome feature to those who don’t have much experience.
☛ Split Database Solution
Developers, customers, and admins in Magento 1 use the same database, which may lead to database overload. If there is a strain on the admin side, it may lead to issues on the customer side.
Magento 2.0 provides you with the chance to use three distinct master databases for product data, checkout and orders. This scalability reduces the negative impact and prevents the load on various databases to maintain a positive performance.
☛ Dashboard
In Magento 2.0, all the important information can be found in one place—the dashboard. The dashboard provides a summary of lifetime sales, last orders, most viewed items, etc.
It also shows your financial data, so you can see how your business is doing whenever you want.
☛ Easier Customization
One of the significant factors all e-commerce business considers seriously is to provide their customers with a customized experience.
You can access your customer’s purchasing behavior easily through Magento 2.
By monitoring behavior on-site, you can learn what our customers want to see and in terms of content, what discounts they want and what you can give them.
This way, you will also be able to plan sales and hand out discount coupons to repeat customers. This too enriches customer experience.
☛ More Efficient Testing
Regression testing to scan for bugs on Magento 1 is not a simple task. Reducing risks becomes a priority when you are working with a complex system that has too many modified modules and extensions, especially if your site sees a lot of traffic.
That is why testing is crucial and it has become easier with Magento 2. The testing framework is built-in and this makes running automatic rests on the sites disregarding the size fairly easy.
☛ Simpler Integration
An excellent feature of the Magento platform is the capability to consolidate various systems such as ERP, CRM, etc.
However, if the integration does not go as planned, it gets difficult to find what messages are lost during the communication.
Magento 2 addresses this specific problem with a built-in RabbitMQ framework that monitors all communication between other systems and Magento.
The MQ stands for Message Queue which refers to its primary function—storing messages that are not sent and forwarding them to respective systems as quickly as possible.
When is Magento 1.9 Getting Out-dated?
Jason Woosley, SVP at Magento Commerce has explained that Magento 1, though said to cease operation in November 2018, has been extended to 18 more months.
However, Woosley encourages every e-commerce store to upgrade from Magento 1.x to Magento 2 so they can access the benefits the innovations are offering.
But mostly, it is better to upgrade anyway because when Magento officially ends support, an increase in malware is a possibility that will target weaknesses discovered after the last security patches are released.
So, upgrading could become important as a security measurement.
Conclusion: Is It Worth Upgrading to Magento 2?
As a business owner, you are ensuring stability when you make the jump from Magento 1 to Magento 2 as the previous versions will eventually become dangerously outdated in the next few years, generally due to the lack of updates, official support, and security patches.
Whether you are a big or small business owner if you are making plans to migrate, make your plans now.
The scale of business does not matter anyway since they will both require plenty of developments, so if the budget allows, upgrade to Magento 2 is necessary for the long run, especially when Magento 2 versions are going to be prominent for the next 7 to 8 years at least.
