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Magento 1
end of life

Oct 29, 2019 Jan Guardian 8 min read

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Magento 1 era. Gone

Magento 1.x has been on the market for over 10 years, having gained a wide community of devotees and supporters.

However, the end of life date for the platform is now set — starting from June 2020, version 1 of both Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source editions, formerly known as Magento Enterprise and Magento Community editions, will no longer be supported by Adobe.

The consequences are no surprise:

  • No official software support

  • No security patches or bug fixes

  • No third-party integration support

  • No third-party extension or theme support

  • No agencies with Magento 1 expertise to help you out

Why Magento 1 end of life matters

Running on an unsupported platform after the end of life could cause irreversible changes to the way Magento 1 sites operate. As security updates and patches will no longer be introduced, you will inevitably face a whole range of vulnerabilities and risks, including:

  • Anonymous hacker with a laptop

    Malware scripts

    Your ecommerce website will fail to block any malicious scripts embedded by penetrators. In the best case scenario your store will become much slower, whereas in the worst — your website will stop functioning completely.

    • Malware
    • Man in the middle attack
    • Cross-site scripting
    • Password attacks
    • Financial frauds
    • DDoS attacks
    • Brute force attacks
    • Spam
    • Phishing
    • Bots
    • SQL injections
    • XSS
    • Trojan horses
  • Woman trying to catch credit cards flying in the air

    Credit card frauds & personal data exposure

    Sensitive payment information becomes highly vulnerable with no proper security means in place. Insecure online transactions and personal data breach risks could lead to tremendous financial damage and lawsuits, consequently triggering the loss of customer trust and confidence.

  • Concerned man studying a bill

    Technical debt accumulation

    The lack of official support will require significant efforts from your in-house team or external service providers to maintain the platform and handle the ever-growing amount of technical issues through additional development. The technical debt will increase progressively, and so will the total cost of ownership.

  • A man with a cracked credit card

    Payment integration failure

    Payment gateway integrations your customers are used to will not be supported by vendors. Figuring out a convenient and easy new way of making payments on your legacy Magento 1 store might become a tough and expensive challenge.

Chances are, your business
might get extinct

Real-life story

Website’s resistance to malware attacks depends heavily on the compatibility of versions of the systems and services it runs on.

A customer of ours used a third-party ERP solution that supported an outdated version of Magento 2, complicating timely platform updates. Having underestimated the severity of the situation, stakeholders decided to leave everything as is rather than to refine the integration between Magento 2 and the ERP system or to update the platform. Compatibility restrictions made the store an easy target for hackers: due to an encrypted malicious code embedded on the site, attackers were able to copy customers’ credit card data on the fly.

Jan Guardian, Chief Business Development Officer @ Staylime

Having detected the vulnerability in the shortest time, our team patched the system to secure it from further attacks and upgraded it to the latest Magento version available, while keeping the ERP integration afloat. Fortunately, we have prevented the irreversible consequences this issue could have caused and convinced the customer that regular updates are a must to ensure that the business is running smoothly.

Is it still a long way off?

The countdown to Magento 1 end of life is on, creating an illusion there is still plenty of room for you to make a maneuver and shift to a newer version.
We’re afraid, we have bad news for you.

Migration to Magento 2 might become a challenging initiative to tackle. Whilst the necessary development works will last for at least 3–6 months, you will also have to take care of numerous project aspects beforehand, such as:

A path full of traps, barriers, and dangers
  • Selecting a qualified migration service provider
  • Defining and planning required deliverables
  • Negotiating on the deliverables with the team and stakeholders
  • Project budgeting and investment planning
  • Migration commencement and implementation
  • Commercial launch of the solution and its integration into existing business processes

Do you still think you have a lot of time for the change? Recall GDPR.

The news about the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was announced almost 2 years before its official enforcement date on May 25, 2018.

Despite the fast-rising hype, the majority of businesses held off on taking actions to ensure timely GDPR compliance. It didn’t take long for regulatory consulting fees to skyrocket, making short-sighted businesses pay a high price.

Magento 2: reasons
to upgrade

01

Magento 2: reasons to upgrade

A fresh start with
no past wrongs

In case migration to Magento 2 is inevitable after Magento 1 end of life, take the most out of this opportunity to breathe new life into your ecommerce business and start afresh. Whether you seek to revise current functionality or make use of custom Magento extensions, any changes or enhancements your business requires can be easily introduced to the new version of the platform.

Magento upgrade is a direct way to streamline existing operations, optimize IT efforts and, consequently, reduce TCO by:

  • Caveman grinding out a wheel

    Refining and optimizing the source code

  • Ancient man throwing out unnecessary parts from a wheel

    Removing irrelevant extensions and unnecessary features

  • Man looking at a wheel in his hands

    Replacing non‑effective and sluggish extensions with Magento 2 alternatives with a cleaner code

  • Ma raising a wheel above his head

    Building highly productive extensions based on Magento guidelines, in cases where ready‑made solutions are not the best choice to meet business requirements

  • Scientist pointing at a wheel he is leaning on

    Developing a fully‑custom responsive theme to transform digital presence, increasing website performance and conversion rates

02

Magento 2: reasons to upgrade

Better performance,
security and SEO

Thanks to robust architecture based on the latest technology stack, as well as better browser caching and JavaScript compression, Magento 2 provides superior performance, outpacing not only Magento 1, but also other ecommerce platforms on the market

The second version of the platform features hashing algorithms for password management, enhanced attack prevention tools, as well as flexible ownership and permission management capabilities, which makes Magento 2 highly secure. Security patches and updates for the platform will continue to be regularly released by Adobe, further enabling strong protection of ecommerce websites from potential vulnerabilities

And with its in-built schema markup, improved XML sitemap, and rich snippets support, Magento 2 excels at SEO too, helping online stores rank higher in search engines.

Magento 2 benefits

PHP 7.x support

Enjoy new security fixes and improvements that directly affect your web store’s speed

Bundled minified JavaScript

Unnecessary browser operations on the client’s side are now reduced

Varnish caching support

Speed up the delivery of your content with a factor of 300–1000x

In-built image compression

Optimize images directly on server using Magento 2 built-in tools

2x faster page loading

Customers now wait less, meaning that they are more likely to convert

Rich snippet support

Enjoy an improved outlook of search engine results

XML sitemap generation

Customize page priority and update frequency for any product

Custom robots.txt

Control which products should appear in search results

Schema.org integration

Boost your Magento SEO by marking up your product page content and metadata

GTM integration

Easily embed Google Tag Manager into your store

Strengthened hashing (SHA-256) for passwords

Passwords are now more resilient to attacks

Improved XSS prevention

Prevent client-side scripts from being injected into your store

Flexible file system ownership and permissions

Make your production filesystem more secure

Improved prevention of clickjacking exploits

Prevent users from being tricked into interaction with invisible or disguised webpage elements

Non-default Magento Admin URL

Prevent target attacks on specific locations using automated password guessing

Preprocessing with LESS

Increase the readability and easen the maintenance of your style-related code

HTML5/CSS3 support

Simplify development with these renowned standards

Templating with Twig

Create reusable components with complex conditions

In-built PayPal, Braintree, Authorize.net, WorldPay integration

Enjoy less hustle with the most crucial functionality, that is — payments

Responsive admin panel

You can now access your store on the go

BI-oriented admin dashboard

You can now monitor your current state of business

Product creation wizard

You can now create new products faster

Taking advantage of the out-of-the-box capabilities provided by Magento 2, Staylime amplifies the platform with custom-built tools and business-specific solutions to ensure your ecommerce website runs like clockwork after the migration.

Going for Magento 2 or
re-platform?
We say Magento 2!

With a multitude of ecommerce platforms available today, deciding on whether to stay on Magento or switch the vendor after Magento 1 end of life is a fair question you might bump into. Based on industry and our own experience, we highly recommend to continue running on one of the leading solutions. There are multiple reasons for that:

  1. You already have experience with Magento: a familiar interface and business logic ensure rapid onboarding with no need for any additional training.
  2. Magento boasts an intuitive and user‑friendly administration panel, making it easy to maintain the website and introduce any necessary changes on your own.
  3. Magento is a highly scalable and extendable platform able to support your business all the way it grows by providing limitless potential for further customization and integration.
  4. An official Magento-specific migration tool is available out-of-the-box, facilitating and accelerating the entire migration process. The transition to any other platform will take a lot more time and effort. Guaranteed.
  5. The investment required to switch between the two versions of Magento is way lower than implementing a solution based on a different platform from scratch. In addition to that, extensions for Magento 1 are most likely already available for Magento 2, which further reduces overall project costs.
Real-life story

Migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is easier and quicker from the technical perspective, which contributes to a more optimized and efficient use of resources.

One of our clients specializing in modular parts production employs a third-party invoicing system integrated with their Magento 1 online store. Understanding the fast approaching date of Magento 1 support shutdown, the invoicing system vendor has already announced the upcoming release of the Magento 2 version of the system. Hence, when Magento migration service will be required it will be rendered smoothly, as the invoicing services they successfully use now will be available for the upgraded platform too.

Jan Guardian, Chief Business Development Officer @ Staylime

Unavailability of optimal alternatives to the extensions and integrations already in place is a major issue a business may collide, if replacing Magento 1 with a different ecommerce platform. Not only will it require additional investment into the initial research of solutions and, later on, their customization, but also into further employee training. Besides, partial business process transformation may be required, in case the new solution is not fully adaptable to existing operations.

All in all, upgrading to Magento 2 is your optimal choice. No doubts.

Migration to Magento 2 with Staylime

From core and database migration to functionality enhancement and user interface fine-tuning, Staylime offers the full scope of Magento migration services, powering businesses with top-notch capabilities of Magento 2.

Success stories

By the way

Our team would be happy to support your current Magento 1 store to set the stage for a seamless migration and ensure uninterrupted business performance throughout your strategic transition.

Keep reading
Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration: full guide

Plan your migration now to ensure seamless, uninterrupted operation of your business and lay a foundation for its further growth.

Magento migration

From automated database migration to complete functionality redevelopment, Staylime takes on all the pains associated with upgrade to Magento 2.

Your migration
project failed?

Whether you’re looking to change your current Magento service provider or recover a troubled migration project, Staylime is ready to undertake project rescue at any stage.

With dozens of Magento upgrade projects behind, our team knows exactly how to make migration a success.

Real-life story

When it comes to store migration, in-depth expertise and project experience, as well as the highest attention to detail of a vendor are the attributes that cannot be compromised on.

One of the infamous Magento service providers took on a migration project for a large ecommerce business with over $60 mln of annual turnover. Laden with deadline and Magento 1 end of life pressure, the project team failed to follow development best practices and made crucial mistakes in Magento’s core, having damaged mission-critical data and store’s functionality. This resulted in higher system support costs and TCO, whereas the technical debt increased respectively. In turn, the website’s performance and speed have decreased, which affected the overall user experience and consequently caused conversion rate drops.

Jan Guardian, Chief Business Development Officer @ Staylime

Recovery costs were immense and business performance decreased drastically, making the company suffer a substantial loss because of the IT vendor’s recklessness.

About the author
Jan Guardian
Chief Business Development Officer @ Staylime

Jan is the Chief Business Development Officer at Staylime, a Magento design and development company headquartered in Redwood City, California. He is responsible for developing and leading the sales and digital marketing strategies of the company. Jan is passionate about ecommerce and Magento in particular — throughtout the years his pieces have been featured on Retail Dive, Hackernoon, Chief Marketer, Mobile Marketer, TMCnet, and many others.

Abode Sales Accredited
Magento Association
HubSpot inbound certified
Microsoft data science professional