Magento is one of the most popular platforms on the web, released in March 2008, and has since grown into one of the largest e-commerce platforms globally. As Magento has developed, more updates and patches have become available to its users to ensure that their sites perform at a high standard. It’s vitally important that businesses keep their Magento platform up to date and users have the most recent release otherwise they will be left in the past.
In November 2015, Magento 2 was released and it started the movement away from Magento 1. However, despite Magento 2 being released nearly 8 years ago there are still more than 167,000 websites that are powered by Magento 1, according to a report from CreativeMinds.
Here at YOMA, we want to migrate as many websites from Magento 1 to Magento 2, and in turn, provide greater security for the user and their customer’s data, and future website development is better supported. Whilst many users are keen to upgrade from an unsupported M1 solution to Magento2, there are a number of perceived hurdles that mean some feel stuck with an ageing platform.
What are the Challenges?
There’s no disputing that there are a number of challenges that can arise when migrating your website and its data from Magento 1 to Magento 2. One of the main items to address is not being able to migrate over 3rd party data. Currently, standard Magento 2 tools do not support the migration of 3rd party data from Magento 1. Here at YOMA, we anticipated that this would be a huge inconvenience for website owners and that’s why we created our own custom module. With this custom module, we can migrate 3rd party data from M1 over to M2 with minimal fuss, whilst also abiding by GDPR rules. This custom module helps eradicate one of the largest challenges of the migration process.
Losing data is a very real possibility for a lot of businesses when they are migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2. This is a massive problem because the business can lose a lot of useful information about its target audience, demographics, and much more, Here at YOMA, we don’t ever want this to happen so we do multiple mock migrations, and a full audit of the data and codebase to ensure that all your customer’s data is safe.
The migration process from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is also a very complex task and a lot of businesses struggle with it. When migrating your data from Magento 1 to Magento 2 there are a lot of steps that need to be taken, and they need to be completed correctly. Here at YOMA, our team are experts at migrating data across, in-fact we have helped over 20+ clients migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2. All of these migrations have gone to plan and we have stuck to the timeframe that we had promised.
Why Should You Migrate Over
There are multiple reasons why a business should migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2 but the most pressing reason is security.
Since June 30th 2020, Magento 1 is no longer supported, patched, or updated and this has left businesses using Magento 1 susceptible to vulnerabilities. Essentially, this means that if a website is hacked or attacked it can be harder to find support or freely available solutions to fix it. There are regular and reactive patches and updates for Magento 2 that are supported by a wide network of contributors. This is a massive benefit of Magento 2 as it ensures that your website is running at its optimal performance, whilst also being at its most secure.
Migrating to Magento 2 can make a website faster, to back this claim up, Magnest reported that Magento 2 has a 30-50% faster page load time compared to Magento 1. Having a good user experience on your website is essential in 2023. According to OutBound, 70% of users will abandon their shopping carts and won’t return to the website if they have a bad user experience. By migrating over from Magento 1 to Magento 2 you can ensure that a website is performing at peak performance and users stay on your website instead of leaving to go to one of your competitors.
The Magento 1s interface is very simple. While the interface of Magento 1 can help website owners find statistics about their revenue, the most recent orders, and the average orders. However, when you compare it to the interface of Magento 2 there is a huge difference! The Magento 2 interface is sleek and provides more information about your website’s performance, whilst also providing all the information that Magento 1 does. Whilst it may look like there is a lot going on, it is still very easy to navigate around and find exactly what is needed.
Summary
There are a wide range of reasons to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2 ranging from security reasons to user experience benefits. Investing in propping up an unsupported platform is delaying the inevitable and exposing a site to unnecessary risks. The benefits can far outweigh the risks of a well managed migration project.
If you need an agency to migrate your website from Magento 1 to Magento 2 then look no further than YOMA. Get in touch with our expert team today.
