The end of Magento 1

When Magento announced back in 2017 that they would no longer support their Magento 1 platform from 2018, it caused a bit of a hoo-ha. Magento made this decision in a move to upgrade their customers onto the all-singing-all-dancing Magento 2. The decision really ruffled some feathers so they extended their notice period to upgrade to June 2020, but if you’re one of the many shops that have been taking a bit too much comfort in your extended grace period, you’ll need to snap to it because that’s in a matter of months!

It’s bad news for Magento 1 (aka Enterprise Edition) shop owners if you want to continue receiving support from Magento, because you now have to either upgrade to Magento 2 or move away to another eCommerce web solution. Either way, there’s an expense. And either way, you have to do SOMETHING.

Depending which version of Magento 1 you are using, you could continue receiving security updates, bug fixes and quality improvements until the end-of-life (“doomsday”) in June 2020. Whichever version you’re on, third party extensions are already no longer supported including any customisations you’ve made, which could really scupper future growth plans. And no matter what, all Magento 1 support ends in June this year.

Well, security would be the main concern. eCommerce stores come with a huge amount of very sensitive data and with no security patches, this really compromises your data. You couldn’t say you weren’t warned if the data protection officer comes a-knockin’.

It’s also going to start creating technical problems with your online shop. The technology will become outdated, glitchy and more prone to IT bottlenecks which will become difficult to resolve. Long story short, it doesn’t make any commercial sense to keep running your shop on Magento 1 after June 2020.

The first option is to upgrade your eCommerce shop to Magento 2. Magento 2 promises to be faster, cleaner and better than Magento 1, featuring faster speeds, better SEO options and improved performance. But you’ll need a dedicated Magento developer to move your data, review customisations and build your new shop, and that could become resource heavy.

Many Magento 1 shop owners are using this as an opportunity to move their eCommerce stores over to Shopify. Shopify offers a hosted eCommerce solution which is modern, flexible, inexpensive and scalable. Shopify eCommerce stores can be designed and built pretty quickly compared to Magento 2, ready to start selling products straight away. They’ll even help shops migrate things over from Magento smoothly. Sweet!

Did we mention we are Shopify Web Designers? We’re pretty good at it. We don’t want this information to lessen the impact of this blog post. It’s all true. Magento 1 shop owners really do have until June this year to do something. Let us help you – get in touch!