Magento 1 is formally being would up by Adobe (the owners of Magento) in June 2020.
For thousands of website owners, this maybe a nightmare scenario.
Basically apart from the improved technical coding and processes in Magento 2, the new platform offers these key advantages:
- Increased speed and performance
- Improved checkout procedures
- Extension code overlap not override
- Better SEO options
- Better security
For a complete list and more detailed explanations of the full list of advantages, please read below.
- Magento 1 is sunsetting June 2020. This means Magento will only release software and security patches through to June 2020 to ensure those sites remain secure and compliant. Once Magento 1 has approached end of life, the platform will become exposed to security issues (potentially serious as time goes by).
- Magento 2 was redesigned with performance in mind. Page loads in Magento 2 are 30% to 50% faster.*
- Studies show that Magento 2 can handle up to 39% more orders per hour with 66% faster add-to-cart times than Magento 1 and with the proper hosting setup can deliver nearly instant server response times for catalog browsing*.
- Magento 2’s better functionality means it can also handle more traffic. Magento 2 can manage 10 million page views an hour; Magento 1 can only process 200,000.*
- Out of the box, without installing a module, Magento 2 now includes an Ajax Cart. Ajax Carts use Javascript to add items to the shoppers cart without reloading the entire page. That puts less load on your hosting hardware and results in a more responsive experience for your shoppers*.
- Magento 2 has a much improved caching system.
- PHP is the programming language that Magento is built with. Magento 2 is optimized for PHP 7, which provides superior performance to previous PHP versions*.
- The new step-by-step product creation tools allow you to more quickly and accurately add products to your store. This tool makes adding products up to 4 times faster in Magento 2*.
- The admin interface is cleaner and less cluttered in Magento 2.
- Adding videos from Vimeo or Youtube are now very simple and supported natively by Magento 2.
- The checkout process is much smoother and simplified compared to Magento 1. Making checkout as simple as possible is vital in having high conversion rates.
- Magento 2 has much needed search improvements to allow customers to more quickly and efficiently find products. Magento 2 has much needed search improvements to allow customers to more quickly and efficiently find products.
- 50% of online transactions are now performed on mobile devices. Magento 2 utilizes many of the enhancements mentioned above to greatly improve user experience on mobile.
Downsides
- Unlike Magento 1 upgrades with their relatively straightforward upgrade process, migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is considerably more complicated for the reasons discussed in the following points.
- Magento 2 is a completely new platform. It has a completely different structure to M1.
- New site design will be required (new theme).
- New extensions will also need to be purchased – payment modules, admin extensions, shipping modules, front end extensions, shopping feed extensions, bespoke and all other third party extensions, etc.
- Some checks on the server will need to be performed to assess whether the server meets the requirements of M2. A new server may need to be purchased.
- Product, order and category data will need to be exported. Larger and more complex sites will take a considerable amount of time.
Check out our simple easy 4 step guide to Magento migration here.
Sources and recommended reading:
