By: Sheila John
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 categorization 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.
- 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 customizations 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.
Author: Sheila John — Senior Developer at Endertech
