Reasons to upgrade from Magento 1 to Magento 2

Why you want to upgrade to Magento 2

A completely redesigned architecture was the basis of this new version. As a result, Magento 2 has a huge amount of technical improvements and functionalities. In addition, there are also a number of other reasons to say goodbye to Magento 1. Below we discuss the reasons why you might want to switch to Magento 2.

Magento 2 is officially supported

Despite earlier tweets from Magento about an early termination of support in 2018, Magento 1 still received its security updates for a long time. Finally, support for Magento 1 did not stop until June 30, 2020.

For many merchants, switching was not an option and thus the initiative and company Mage One was born. Mage One develops patches for Magento 1 and Vicus, as a partner, can offer a maintenance option for Magento 1 until July 2029.

Fortunately, it is possible for Magento 1 to take care of your security updates, but consider this mainly a temporary solution and an undesirable situation. It is always wiser to switch to a platform for which the vendor provides support and takes responsibility in releasing security updates.

Magento 2 is faster

Speed was an issue for Magento 1 for a long time and let's be clear, Magento 2 is super fast. Page load times in Magento 2 have now become 30% to 50% faster. Per hour, Magento 2 can now process 39% more orders. The response time for adding products to the shopping cart has become 66% faster. (Source: Magento 2.0 Performance & Scalability)

Achieving such a performance gain is possible thanks to the use of all sorts of contemporary technology, of which full page caching (with Varnish caching) is the biggest contributor to this speed gain. This means that Magento 2 saves certain content to be loaded again very quickly the next time.

When your web shop responds and loads faster, there is more user interaction, more products are added to the shopping cart and we can sell more and have fewer unused shopping carts.

Magento 2 is more scalable

Following on from performance always comes the question of scalability. For example, thanks to its good performance, Magento 2 is able to handle around 10 million page visits, while Magento 1 remains stuck at a respectable 200,000 page visits.

Magento 2 makes adding stores, modules and products fast, trouble-free and easy. Your webshop can therefore easily grow to thousands of orders per day or scale up to larger catalogs if necessary.

Magento 2 is safer

The loss of development of security updates for Magento 1 is a major security issue. As a result, Magento 1 is insufficiently protected against viruses, malware and hackers. The risk of data leakage is thus very high. Magento 2 does not suffer from this problem because it is actively provided with security updates from the supplier.

Magento 1 and Magento 2 both have a different underlying architecture that handles security differently. Magento 1 gave you significantly more freedom in selecting external modules, such as payment modules. Using this third-party software also meant a higher risk of security breaches in Magento 1. Magento 2 uses strict standards for program code that also apply to developers building extensions and customizations.

Magento 2 complies with laws and regulations

As a company, you are in violation of the General Data Protection Regulation (AVG) if you do not adequately secure customer data to prevent data breaches. The Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) can impose a fine on organizations that violate the AVG. Therefore, if you do not implement security updates on Magento 1 and allow the possibility of data leaks, you are in violation of the AVG.

Magento 2 also does not have this problem because it is actively maintained with security updates. When you implement these security updates you have acted in the best interest of your customers to prevent data breaches.

Magento 2 has a better management environment

Compared to Magento 1, the management environment of Magento 2 is still significantly more intuitive and user-friendly. You get used to everything, of course, but the backend of Magento 1 could be quite intimidating to use. The current backend looks good and works well. The advantage is that you can work more efficiently and quickly in the backend and non-technical users can handle it better.

Magento 2 offers better options for SEO

No doubt about it, Magento 2 is definitely better at search engine optimization (SEO). Whereas with Magento 1 it was quite a bit of hassle with additional extensions, Magento 2 offers many options for SEO out-of-box.

For example, there is support for rich snippets, an enriched piece of search results in Google. These rich snippets give you more visibility in the search results and increase the number of clicks on your page.

The XML sitemap has also been addressed in Magento 2. Admittedly, you could already do this in Magento 1, but now Magento 2 can also submit your sitemap file to search engines. In addition, it is now possible to specify a maximum number of urls and the maximum file size for your sitemap.

In Magento 2 you can have meta tags for your products created automatically using so-called placeholders. Meta tags are especially important nowadays to make the title and description clearly visible within the search results for potential visitors.

Magento 2 can create and edit the robots.txt file for you, whereas before Magento 1 you had to create this file manually yourself. Robots.txt tells a search engine crawler which parts of the website it should not crawl.

And finally, if you use Google Adwords you can now integrate it with the Magento 2 backend to count your conversions.

Magento 2 is more responsive

Magento 1 was not always mobile friendly but with Magento 2 this is over. The default theme of Magento 2 is fully responsive and adapts effortlessly to any device with a different screen size and ratio. Many webshops use this standard template and are therefore immediately done with making their webshop mobile-friendly. The checkout is now also fully optimized for mobile use.

Magento 2 has more extensions

Because the platforms Magento 1 and 2 are so different, the extensions for Magento 1 are not directly usable for Magento 2. In addition, the developers of all kinds of extensions for now mainly develop for Magento 2. At the time of publication of this blog article there are 3,591 articles available on the Magento Marketplace. When you search for extensions for Magento 1 you notice that they are still there, but the numbers are not even close to those for Magento 2.

Magento 2 offers product videos and better search feature

In Magento 2 it is possible to place product videos on the product page. You can load these videos from YouTube. For this you need an API key that you need to include in the backend. Then in Magento 2 you can completely configure how the video is used on your product pages.

In addition, the search function that is included in Magento 2 has been greatly improved, but you can also integrate an external search engine such as ElasticSearch or Sphinx within the search function of your Magento 2 webshop. One of the most important features of a webshop is being able to quickly search among thousands of products. If the results are relevant and your search speed is high, you will get more satisfied customers and more sales.

How to migrate to Magento 2

In the long run, the cost of maintaining (and continuing to develop) a Magento 1 webshop will exceed the cost of switching to Magento 2. Eventually, every Magento 1 webshop will have to switch to a newer platform. The question is when the right moment has arrived for your switch.

Now, it may also be the case that the Magento 2 offers fewer advantages for you. Depending on your needs, WooCommerce might be a nice alternative.

Costs of a migration and the expected revenues of your web shop play an important role in deciding how to make this switch. Costs of a migration in turn are determined by a number of things:

• Can your template be easily migrated to Magento 2?
• How much customization of Magento 1 can be easily migrated?
• How much customization of Magento 1 needs to be rewritten?
• Are all your used modules from Magento 1 also available in Magento 2?
• Are all your used links from Magento 1 also available for Magento 2?

This is also a good time to take stock of whether all those extensions, modules and links really need to be migrated. Possible migration costs will let you weigh up how necessary certain functionality is for your webshop.

With additional security updates, you still have plenty of time to set up a thorough re-platforming process, but you will need to take action. The transition to Magento 2 begins with a migration plan that includes the following steps:

1. Identify and evaluate your current Magento extensions
2. Install Magento 2.x and the Data Migration Tool on a test environment.
3. Do a trial migration on a test environment
4. Start the migration process on a test environment
5. Check and modify the migrated data if necessary
6. Start incremental migration (updating data from Magento 1 to Magento 2)
7. Go-live with Magento 2

So such migrations need a good migration plan and careful planning. If you are looking for help to migrate to Magento 2 you can always contact us. Vicus builds, repairs and maintains Magento webshops since 2007. Contact Vicus to create a successful B2B Magento webshop or catalog.

Alternative to Magento 2

There are several situations imaginable that you do not or do not yet want to switch to Magento 2. In that case, Vicus can offer you three alternatives. We are happy to advise you on this.

• Keeping your Magento 1 shop up and running keeps it secure through a combination of specialized extra secure hosting, TrustGuard security scans and a subscription to Mage One's security patches.
• Convert your Magento 1 webshop to OpenMage Long Term Solution. This is a solution that allows you to continue working on the Magento 1 platform in the long term. You can read more about this via this link.
• Migrate your Magento 1 webshop to WooCommerce.