Is Moving From Magento 1 to Magento 2 Right For You?

Agencies will get fully booked

Moving to Magento 2 isn’t just a simple upgrade, it requires a team of skilled developers and designers to replatform your eCommerce store over a timescale of a few months.

It’s a complex system and you’ll need a lot of support to do this, so if you don’t have in-house Magento developers, your best bet is an agency. However, agencies are getting fully booked with Magento 1 migrations so you’ll be hard pushed to find a Magento agency with much free time between now and the End of Life to take this work on.

Lengthy replatforming timeframes

Depending on the size of your website, Magento 1 to 2 migration can take months to set up properly, at this point, you may begin to wander into the cut-off date for official support, June 2020 running the risks for your website to be open to security breaches and hacks as there will be no further security patches past this date.

SEO functionality

The rewrite functionality when migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 has been known to cause duplicate pages, leading to issues with SEO for retailers. The duplicated pages can result in your site being penalised by Google, which isn’t an added risk you want to run when migrating your site – potentially affecting sales and customer experience.

Incompatible themes

Magento 1 themes are not compatible with Magento 2, so you’ll have to invest some time in finding and implementing a new theme on Magento 2 for your website – this will require support from a professional Magento developer with the knowledge of programming and the platform. Whilst there are premade themes you can choose from, if you want to keep your theme the same, you will require support.

Security issues

The default Magento 2 requires a lot of configuration to get the most out of your security, so you may see problems arising in the interim of getting this right if you use Magento 2. Poor security can compromise your website and customer data, so this is a key area to focus on when deciding to replatform with Magento or with another provider.

Third-party extensions

Some extensions are not compatible between Magento 1 and Magento 2. There are toolkits to help move some custom code across (not all is going to be compatible), but you will need to source and install new extensions to match the functionality of those you were using on Magento 1.

Unfortunately, Magento 2 is not feature-rich and requires the integration of a lot of third-party extensions in order to function at the level you’d want it to and give your customers the highest level of service they deserve. Using third-party extensions is not only time-consuming (a limited resource for us all!) but can be extremely costly, quickly bumping up your website costs for maintenance of them, updating, or replacing as time goes on.

This is another example of the volume of fragmented eCommerce systems on the market, which is incredibly frustrating for e-tailers wanting to get on with their businesses.