Benefits of Migration to Latest Magento Version

It has been officially announced that Magento 1 rounded off its support on June 20, 2020, which means that new features and updates are no longer delivered for this edition of the platform. How will it affect your business? Staying with Magento 1, you are likely to experience:

• Security problems. Running an unsupported version of Magento can lead to security breaches and hacks. You will not receive any platform improvements, updates, or security patches, which will make your site vulnerable to malware attacks unless you migrate.

• Slow performance. There have been many complaints about Magento 1 performance, which means that without migration you will have to keep struggling with poor loading speeds, which, in turn, decreases your traffic and, hence, sales.

• No vendor support. Magento 1 is already viewed as a dying platform, so Magento developers will not be willing to invest in fixing or improving their Magento 1 extensions. Magento development companies will focus their efforts on creating new Magento 2 extensions, while many Magento 1 extensions will become outdated and will stop working properly, ultimately causing issues with your store’s functionality. Moreover, as new features will not be added to Magento 1, your store competitiveness will be at risk.

Migration to Magento 2 will help you eliminate these issues and avoid risks while ensuring increased website performance and better customer experience.

Why you should migrate

• Migration to Magento 2 brings you a great opportunity to revise your existing functionality and the way you operate your business. You can optimize the source code of any custom functionality from the very beginning, eliminate extensions and features that are no longer in use, introduce new enhancements, and modify a ready-made theme in accordance with your branding or develop a custom one from scratch. Use this opportunity to start afresh and avoid previous mistakes.

• Avoiding security issues is one of the key Magento migration benefits. When Adobe stops releasing Magento 1 security patches and updates, your customers’ data will be at risk. Magento 2 has put a considerable focus on securing your ecommerce store through two-factor authentication, a dynamic backup plan, and unique admin URLs. Moreover, regular releases of security patches for Magento 2 will help protect your online store from potential threats.

• Magento 2 has better out-of-the-box functionality, offering integrations with popular services, including payment gateways like PayPal or Braintree. It also has integrations with Worldpay and CyberSource that ensure secure payments.

Key Magento migration benefits

Migration to Magento 2 will allow your business to benefit from:

• Improved store performance due to decreased load time and improved scalability;

• Simplified business management thanks to the improved admin interface and advanced reporting capabilities;

• Better customer experience and loyalty thanks to a user-friendly checkout process, a mobile-friendly interface, and marketing automation features.

Improved store performance

Slow website loading speeds can frustrate your site’s visitors and result in low conversions and high shopping cart abandonment rates. Magento 2 sites on average perform way superior to Magento 1 sites, being able to handle 40% more orders each hour and showing faster site speeds. Due to the latter, Magento 2 sites can handle many more catalog pages without slowing down. It ultimately improves user experience and results in higher conversions. Quick response times and the ability to deal with peak loads also make Magento 2 a great candidate for large stores.

Besides, Magento 2 leverages Varnish Cache, an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy websites, which makes it easy to cache requests, reducing system loads and improving speed. As a result, you won’t keep your site’s visitors waiting for long.

Simplified business management

Magento 2 has a more user-friendly admin interface, which simplifies the process of managing an online store. Magento 2 admin interface offers drag-and-drop layout editing, so admins do not require technical background or coding skills to modify an online store’s appearance. As a result, it helps to reduce the time needed to create a store significantly. Magento 2 admins can also customize the admin panel in a way to ensure that important business information is accessed quickly. Personalized admin panel helps admins easily manage orders and customer data.

In Magento 1, only a single admin can engage with product data. Magento 2 has eliminated this limitation, enabling multiple administrators to work with product data. If you have a large online store, it will ensure ease of management of your products by a group of people.

Besides, Magento 2 comes with advanced reporting capabilities, providing you with actionable insights and making your business management even more effective. There are 20 online store reports located in your Magento Admin. The reports offer insights into 3 critical areas: 

1. orders (e.g., total number of orders, taxes collected), 
2. customers (e.g., number of registered accounts), 
3. products (e.g., products that sell best). 

Reporting is dynamic and allows you to keep an eye on important business metrics in real time.

Better customer experience

Great customer experience plays a key role in your online business success, ensuring customer loyalty and brand credibility. Modern online shoppers want to place orders easily and quickly. Magento 2 allows consumers to check out without registration. Unlike that in Magento 1, the checkout is now more intuitive and requires fewer steps and consumer data. When consumers want to make a purchase, all they need to do is to click on the instant purchase button and they will be redirected to a confirmation page to place their order. This way, Magento 2 helps consumers avoid the long account registration process, delivering a swift shopping experience.

The Magento team made mobile responsiveness a priority in Magento 2, which also gives additional points towards why you should migrate. Modern shopping relies heavily on smartphones and tablets with around 40% of online orders coming from mobile devices. Magento 2 provides for mobile-responsive templates by default. It makes your online store easy to navigate regardless of the device in use or screen resolution, thus ensuring enhanced customer experience and driving more sales.

Besides, Magento 2 helps you build strong customer relationships through email marketing. The platform integrates with Dotmailer, the email marketing automation tool, which allows you to create automated campaigns through SMS, Push, and email in only a few minutes. You can also send automated emails to consumers based on their shopping cart contents and activity in your store, thus encouraging them to make or complete a purchase.

Other items to consider

• Latest technology stack. Magento 2 leverages the latest technologies and techniques, including database clustering and performance monitoring which ensure the platform’s superior performance.

• Advanced SEO settings. Magento 2 outperforms Magento 1 in SEO due to rich snippet support, dynamic metadata templates, and Google Tag Manager integration. Magento 2 SEO settings can help you automate tedious manual tasks, greatly reducing the workload for your managers while improving your online store visibility and bringing new customers to the store.

• Customer segmentation. Magento 2 allows you to create customer segments based on customer activity in your online store. It helps deliver the right content to the right visitors, which results in enhanced customer retention. You can also generate reports to quickly analyze the number of customers in each segment.

• Separate databases. In Magento 1, developers and admins use a single database to cater information on orders and product data. It causes database overloads and leads to poor website performance. Magento 2 offers separate databases to access this information, which helps to eliminate system failures and database overloads.

• Improved search. Elasticsearch became a natively supported feature in Magento 2, providing numerous benefits, such as quick and advanced searches on products, support for synonyms, multiple languages support, and in-built auto-completer.

• Ajax cart extension. Consumers often experience problems with Magento 1‑based stores when adding products to their shopping cart. Every time they add a new product to the shopping cart, it is reloaded automatically. This process can take more than 5 seconds, disrupting your customers’ shopping experience. Magento 2 overcomes this limitation through the Ajax cart extension, which allows users to add items to the cart without any page disturbance.

• Enhanced design. The design of your online store can have a significant impact on your customers’ buying decisions. Magento 1 templates, which are not mobile-friendly and have a lengthy checkout process can no longer satisfy the demands of modern consumers. Magento 2 offers many attractive templates that look great on any device by default.

Before you start

The days of Magento 1 are numbered and migration to Magento 2 seems to be a reasonable step to operate efficiently. For a smooth Magento migration, we recommend you to consider the following steps:

• Analyze your current Magento 1 website. Figure out which features you want to fix and which features should be implemented on your new website, eliminate redundant data and extensions, etc.

• Review your current theme. Review your existing Magento theme and choose a Magento 2 template to customize in line with your branding guidelines or create a new theme altogether.

• Create a migration plan. Write down every idea that you have to ensure that your new website aligns with your business goals.

• Back up your data. To prevent unexpected issues and ensure no data is lost, make constant database backups during migration.