8 Reasons Why You Should Upgrade to Magento 2 Sooner Rather Than Later

The newer version isn’t just polish and promise; it runs faster. It can handle substantially more traffic. It is a complete performance upgrade on every level.

Magento 2 can handle just shy of 30 percent more orders per hour. Information on sites loads up to 50 percent faster. In general, it is built to handle 50 times the level of web traffic as Magento 1. 

Homepage, Product listing pages and product detail pages load in less than 1.5 seconds. This is important once 53% Mobile users abandon sites that take longer than 3 seconds to load, 1 second delay in page load time results in 7% loss in conversions, 11% loss in page views and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

Those stat increases translate to tangible results. Shopzilla is a high-profile case that is often touted by Magento 2 proponents. After upgrading, the site saw a 25-percent increase in views and a 9.5-percent increase in revenue. It may not be fair to attribute all of those increases to a Magento upgrade, but there’s no question that removing throttling issues on an ecommerce website is good for your business.

“Data breach” is the ultimate taboo word in Ecommerce. It’s a terrifying possibility that every website administrator has to understand. Magento 1 is not yet out of support. It is still receiving security updates (more on that in a minute). Even so, it’s not the favorite child of Adobe anymore.

Magento 1 security updates mostly deal with obvious exploits. The big, systemic changes that stay ahead of the constant evolution of malicious attacks are all focused on Magento 2. 

According to Sergio Taddeo, Eccomerce Director and Magento Solution Specialist:

"Your holistic security landscape is better when you upgrade to Magento 2, even while Magento 1 is still under support."

No matter how powerful your platform might be, you still have to run the website. It needs updates and oversight, and that means effort on your part.  

When you compare both Magento 1 and Magento 2 admin, it’s clear that the first one was built by developers with the best of intentions, but let’s face it, good intentions don’t help when all you want is to add a new marketing promo rule. Magento 2 admin was made to increase the User Experience since a huge portion of people using Magento daily is from marketing, sales, customer representatives and they are not developers.

Magento 2 is designed to make website administration more efficient. Product creation tools handle some of the workload of adding product to the website. Improved viewing and filtering don’t just help shoppers; they help you go through your own catalog and data to customize what you need. Additionally, a cleaner admin interface is streamlined to help you spend less time finding the resources you need and more time making the changes you deem to be important.

Another new feature. Available on Magento Commerce (paid version) only, the page builder is a drag and drop page builder tool that allows non-technical people to create modern pages, fully responsive blocks, graphic assets, products and text within minutes. They can also design content updates, preview them live, and schedule publication without having to depend on other departments.

There is basically an entire industry of professionals dedicated to this one concept. The customer experience is everything for ecommerce. When going from Magento 1 to 2, there are countless little improvements that help with customer experience. They can be boiled down to three important changes.

• First is search. Magento 2 search features are more powerful, and they help users find what they want faster and more reliably.

• Second is checkout. The Magento 2 checkout reduces the number of steps in the process. Customers experience less frustration and spend less time in checkout.

• Third, and most important, is mobile browsing. When Magento 1 was originally developed, the majority of internet traffic was still on traditional computers. Today, roughly two-thirds of all internet traffic is mobile. Your mobile experience is more important than your desktop browsing, and Magento 2 is designed with that in mind.

Optimizing a site for search engines in 2010 was completely unrecognizable by 2020 standards. Search engine algorithms have evolved substantially, and the means of getting to that elusive first page require more investment.

Magento 2 is optimized for modern search engines. It’s easy for web crawlers to find the information they need and give you a fair ranking. You don’t want to be buried under thousands of pages of search results after working so hard on your site. Magento 2 Luma theme is fully responsive which makes easy to browse on all devices and this is a must-have since Google’s algorithms have been officially favouring mobile-friendly websites in ranking.

Even if you don’t have an in-house SEO expert, Magento will automatically add URL Key, Meta Title, Meta Keyword and Description, based on your product name and product description.

In its day, Magento 1 did good things to website databases. It allowed Ecommerce sites to handle large data pools rather efficiently. By today’s standards, Magento 1 is seriously lacking. The platform only allows for a single database for any domain. That forces you to combine customer, administrative and developer databases into a single system, and it’s easy to overload.

Magento 2 starts you off with three segmented databases. By default, your product data, checkout and orders are all neatly separated. Overloads are far less common, and it’s easier to manage all your data.

Multi-Source Inventory (MSI) is a brand-new functionality presented on Magento 2.3 version that allows merchants to combine inventory across multiple sources. Some examples of the source are warehouses, brick-and-mortar stores, distribution centers, and drop shippers. Any location can be designated as a source for virtual products. This allows merchants to provide a truly omnichannel experience through different points of sales and distribution centers.

One of the great changes to take over the internet over the years is extensions.

In all manner of applications, extensions make life better. Or, they can make life miserable if you’re using a system that can’t handle your extensions.

Using extensions in Magento 1 is clunky at best. Magento 2 makes things faster and easier by streamlining HTML5, LESS and CSS3 within the platform.

Here’s the bottom line. Magento has announced an official end of support for Magento 1: June 20, 2020.

Magento provides software maintenance for Major and Minor Releases of the Magento Open Source software from the release date of each applicable Major and Minor Release based on the following lifecycle schedule:

Once June 2020 comes, there will be no more support. Security updates stop. Cross-platform support ends. You are entirely on your own.

• No Security: Without the regular Magento security patches, your website will be vulnerable and easily hacked
• No Competitive Advantage: Your website will be outdated and you won't be able to keep up with your customers' demands
• No New Features: You will lose access to the new features and important updates from Magento.
• No Support: you will no longer have access to Magento support