Do I need to upgrade from Magento 1?

If you’re running your shop on Magento 1, you’ve probably been analyzing for years upgrading to Magento 2 or moving away from Magneto altogether.

Q: Do I really need to upgrade?

A: no, but eventually yes.

Security

Since Magento 1’s end-of-life in June 2020, you might be worried about security or compliance. However, there are hosting providers that still specialize in Magento 1 and offer support for production deployments, so you’re actually somewhat covered on that front.

Development

This is the major problem, Magento 1 developers: no new developers start learning Magento 1 now, and existing Magento 1 developers have been constantly migrating away from Magento 1 to Magento 2, as new lucrative opportunities are on Magento 2 and developers rather work on a modern code-base and start-from-scratch projects, rather than doing maintenance work on an old code-base.

This means that developers will become harder to find and more expensive over time. As a result, your maintenance budget will continue to grow, and adding new functionality will become prohibitively expensive.

Support & Extensions

Your Magento 1 shop possibly uses plenty of 3rd party extensions. These extensions won’t receive support anymore, so any issues that come up in the future will be up to your team to fix.

New extensions will also be impossible to find, so any new trends or changes to integrations will fall on your developers too. New services, payment gateways, shipping carriers, CRMs, or marketing tools will develop their Magento 2 extension but not a Magento 1 extension, so you’ll have to either pay for that development yourself or not use that new service.

Big Investments

So although you might be ok with investing in maintaining your current shop, when you think about a redesign or building new functionality, you have a feeling of throwing money away. Much like spending thousands of dollars on repairing a broken-down 25yr old car, you have a feeling that just buying a new one would be cheaper and less painful.

Conclusion

So if your current Magento 1 integration works fine and you’re happy with your shop, then there’s no rush to upgrade. However, know that sooner or later you will need to make the switch, so start planning for that it becomes an emergency.

Our product is a Software-as-a-Service offering build on Magento 2 and a bespoke PWA frontend, so in your research process, give our product a look.