The Magento 1 sunsetting is underway, with 2020 being the official end of support for the venerable eCommerce platform. Many business owners are worried what it will mean for their store: just how much work is it going to take to switch to Magento 2? Do we really need to? Will it break everything? The answers to what are: a fair amount, yes, and no. I’m going to go over some of the concerns and considerations for you, to help you perform a successful Magento migration.
1. Migrating Magento 1 to Magento 2 is exceptionally difficult
I’m not about to tell you it’s easy but no, the migration isn’t odiously difficult, especially if you work a lot with Magento. Noted certified developer Konstantin Gerasimov did a great guide that will take you through the technical side of things if you want to dive in, but the short version is that a Magento 1 → 2 migration can result in as little as an afternoon’s downtime, depending on the size of the site. Realistically you’re looking at 1-3 months development times but, since you follow the guide and cloned your site, the old Magento 1 install is still up and running to fill in the gap.
2. Support for Magento 1 will be discontinued entirely
Magento 1 Open-Source will remain, well, open-source. That means there will continue to be free community support. What you’re not going to get is official support, patches or updates. The community is large and hard-working and that’ll help to smooth out issues, but you’re going to start feeling the hurt when the first undiscovered 0day vulnerability comes up and you don’t have official patch support. It will be entirely possible to keep running Magento 1 beyond its end of life, but the further you go beyond the date, the more likely it becomes that your site will become compromised. There won’t be any new features to Magento 1 or major updates: the community may keep things running, but they’re mostly bailing water rather than sailing ahead.
2020 is not a hard deadline, but it’s the date Magento 1 goes from full steam ahead to bailing water, and it’s hard to say how long the open-source community will keep the ship afloat.
If you’re on Magento 1 Enterprise Edition, then you’re totally out of luck. Migrate or die.
3. Magento 2 doesn’t add anything
No. Right from the outset, it supports PHP7 while Magento 1 only supports PHP5. PHP7 is up to date and runs on the new PHPNG engine, which gives it a big performance boost on PHP5 in certain circumstances, and comes with a bevy of powerful new features like the spaceship operator, type declarations and massively improved syntax. That alone puts it head and shoulders above Magento 1, but we’re not done. Magento 2 also gives you a huge performance boost and an improved admin panel, along with better security and SEO. Magento 2 is a huge upgrade, and failing to switch is going to have consequences. The sun is setting on Magento 1. It had a good run, but it’s time to move on. Magento 2 is faster, more powerful, more versatile, and it will last longer. The switch might take some work, but it’s more than worth it.
It can be difficult, but making the switch is well worth it. There are many perks to Magento 1 to Magento 2 Migration as described by this blog post by CodeClouds. The clock is ticking, and it’s about time you migrated over and saw what everybody was talking about with Magento 2.
