Migrating from Magento 1.x to 2.x : Is it the right time?

Will Magento stop supporting Magento 1.X after November 2018?

A question that has created a lot of speculations and misconceptions among the Magento community since the folks at Magento announced their plans to relinquish support for Magento 1.9.

These speculations got some fresh air very recently when Magento made yet another announcement of revised plans for discontinuing support for 1.9 by pushing the date further by 18 months. A step that seems to have been taken after receiving much criticism and feedbacks from many Magento evangelists.

This move made a lot of sense as they must have realised that among the 250,000 merchants who are actively using Magento, more than half of the merchants are still using 1.9 as their daily eCommerce store driver.

If one thinks about it, it seems more of a tacit announcement from Magento for its users to start preparing for an upgrade to Magento 2.0.

But what is all the fuss about Upgrading to 2.0? Haven’t we upgraded Magento in the past to reach till 1.9? What has changed with 2.0 now?

To understand this, let’s first realise how Magento 2.x is different from 1.9.

Magento 2 sure is worth all the hype that was generated before its launch and those who have used it have acknowledged this fact as well.

There are a lot of new features offered in Magento 2 as compared to Magento 1, namely:

Significantly improved scalability.
Ability to use Varnish caching out of the box.
An HTML5 and CSS3 preprocessor.
Better database performance.
Built-in functionality to compress images.
A complete redesign that makes it fast, secure and much more user-friendly
A user-friendly setup to install upgrades.

Suffice to say, Magento 2 has gone all out to transform Magento as an eCommerce platform that drips with ease of use, accessibility, speed and versatility.

But all of this came at a cost.

Magento store owners cannot directly jump to 2.0 from previous versions as there is no backwards compatibility between them anymore.

An upgrade to 2.x is virtually a rebuild of your existing store that involves the migration of following components to 2.x:

Current theme
Current Extensions
Custom functionality
Products
Orders

Clearly, the upgrade process involves lot more intricacies as compared to previous Magento upgrades you might be used to so far and hence, it involves a lot more time and investment.

So how to determine the right time to make the switch?

To be honest, if there ever was a correct time to migrate to Magento 2.0 then it is now, ( i.e. 2 years before Magento officially discontinues Magento 1.x.)

Do you wonder WHY? Let’s consider the following key points:

1. To begin with, Magento 2.0 is now much more stable and secure than ever. With each passing day, you will get new and improved updates in Magento 2.0 if you plan a migration now, whereas Magento 1.x is already on the path of deprecation.
2. An eCommerce store goes through a lot of changes in a span of Two years and to keep it fresh, you might probably make plenty of investments in maintenance and keeping the look and feel of the store refreshed. It makes more sense to go through with the migration now rather than making investments in maintenance and customizations in a store which eventually will require being rebuilt.

1. An average Magento 2.0 upgrade takes around 2 to 4 weeks of effort depending upon the custom functionalities built in your store or the changes you are looking to implement in the existing theme or functionality. Keeping this in mind, try comparing the cost of maintenance over the next two years if you stick to Magento 1.x versus the cost of migration to Magento 2.0 and then maintaining it till the next 2 years.
  The investment in the latter will sound much more rational.

1. You also do not want to get caught in an Eleventh-hour rush so choose to hire magento developer in India today from The Brihaspati Infotech, as that could be a time when most of the top developers will be occupied and you might get overcharged for the migration because of low supply and high demand. On the other hand, developers will be eager to take on Magento 2.0 projects currently as Magento 2.0 projects are very scarce and they will look to add couple such projects in their portfolios.
  
  Exploit this and you can expect an optimized magento store for your ecommerce business at a value for money deal.

To put in a Nutshell..

Magento may or may not extend support for version 1.9 post-2020 and odds are favouring the latter hypothesis. Regardless, the hints given by Magento about their plans for Magento 1.x and the capabilities of Magento 2.x are reason enough for Magento fanatic merchants to adopt and leverage the best of Magento 2.x.

Magento 2.x is hands down the future of Magento and might well be the future of eCommerce as well and this ongoing period might well be a Goldilocks zone for merchants who are still using Magento 1.x to make the switch to Magento 2.0

Are you gearing up to upgrade to Magento 2.x? Get in touch with your queries or requirements.

We will be delighted to talk.