In 2018, Magento announced that they would continue support of Version 1 until June 2020. We are now less that one year from that date, so let’s have a quick think about what you might need to plan in before that date.
Options
First thing to note is that you do have choices.
1) Migrate to Version 2
2) Migrate to an alternative platform
3) Do nothing
Let’s hit these in reverse order. Doing nothing, will your site stop working? Possibly not, although that in part depends on any 3rd party integrations / suppliers you are working with. If they only support the latest version in their API’s then they could reasonably decommission older connectors / call outs / API structures. On the basis that it does keep ticking over, then you can carry on transacting. BUT when you run into an issue the costs of supporting it will have increased as only developers that are willing to support legacy platforms will offer any level of coverage, and typically they charge extra as they themselves cannot source vendor support. Patching will not be made available by the vendor, so that impacts security / vulnerabilities that may be identified in the future.
Migrating to an alternative platform is feasible, so what do you need to consider? Structure, customisations, user-training, scale, data centre regions, developer costs, ready-to-go migration plans to carry your e-commerce experience to another platform, user experience, does the customer journey map out in a similar or desired way? Project resources and allocation. Does the data need to be ‘translated’ to the new platform or can the new platform import data in the native format that you have with Magento.
Finally, we have Migrating from version 1 to version 2 of Magento – the four core areas that you’ll look at are Themes, Extensions, Code and Data. Whilst there isn’t a direct migration tool from the vendor, the level of experience that Magento focused developers have in migrating between versions does mean that they have structured programmes / methodologies to follow.
Three options, though we’d humbly suggest doing nothing isn’t really an option. What we would say is regardless of whether you’d like to look an alternative platform or migrate to Magento 2, one thing is for sure – you definitely need to allocate time and energy into reviewing the two options and then allow suitable time to plan the migration away from Magento 1 ahead of the end of life date – and the clock is ticking.
We’re here to help either way, feel free to pick up the phone or come and meet us for a coffee (other beverages are available) and we’ll map out a process that sees you getting the result you and your business needs.
