Why Upgrading Your Magento 1 Store Is The First Thing You Should Do In 2020

While we can’t predict what the next decade has in store for businesses, one thing which is certain for all e-commerce stores running on Magento 1 is their platform needs an upgrade as soon as possible.

Magento 1 swiftly reaching its End of Life deadline — June 30, 2020, and Magento store owners worldwide aren’t sure about the future of their online store. They are wondering what to do and what will happen to their site when Magento 1 is put to rest?

• Will the site explode?
• Will the site crash suddenly?
• Will the database meltdown?
• Will customers get their orders for free?
• Not really.
• But things will get ugly. Pretty ugly.

Let’s take a look at 5 things that will happen when Magento will end support for Magento 1 after June 2020

1) Bug Fixes and Security Patches Will Stop

Magento will provide updates, security patches, bug fixes, and support for both Magento 1.x Open Source (Community Edition) and Magento 1.x Commerce (Enterprise Edition) through June 30, 2020.

After that…your site is on its own.

Though it’s unlikely your Magento 1 store will crash completely as soon as Magento 1 End of Life hits you will stop receiving patches or support of any kind from Magento.

But there’s something more to it!If your storefront is not on Magento 2 by June 30, 2020, you won’t be able to report bugs, get fixes, or patch your system anymore. That means, your site will be an easy target for hackers and credit card skimmers. Also, the performance and security of your website will degrade over time. The longer you delay the upgrade, the worse these problems will get.

Start early.

2) Extension Developers Will End Support

If you’re running a good number of Magento 1 extensions, you might have already noticed a decrease in support for your extensions. Developers are shifting the development and support of extensions from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

Plus, the market for Magento 1 extensions is much smaller than Magento 2 — and decreasing every day. It’s going to be harder for you to get support for your Magento 1 extensions by the time June 2020 rolls around.

3) Hiring Developers to Work on Your Magento 1 Site Will Become More Expensive

If you have experience in Magento development, you may already be handling updates and security patches for your Magento 1 website.But if you don’t handle updates on your own, and prefer to hire developers, you may have to pay more to developers for Magento 2 migration.

Because most qualified developers have moved on to Magento 2, you’ll have a smaller pool of developers to choose from for upgrading your store. And the ones that you do find will be pricier.

4) Your Business Might Lose PCI Compliance (Or Customer Credit Card Data)

Of course, this depends on how your store handles payments. For example, if you use a third-party payment gateway you don’t have a high risk of losing your PCI compliance.

However, part of PCI compliance also involves the security of the platform on which your website is built. And it’s good to be on the safe side by using a platform — Magento 2, Shopify and more, which are not reaching the end of life cycle like Magento 1.

Plus, when Magento 1 will not release any security patches and end support, many previously-unknown flaws will be exploited by hackers.

Also, if you continue running your store on Magento 1 after June 2020, you will be opening it up to many huge liabilities. In case any customer data is stolen from your website (though we definitely don’t want that to happen), you may have to pay steep fines.

You may be worried after knowing this but according to a report by IBM, the average cost of a data breach in 2019 is $242 per stolen record.This is a hefty price to pay for sticking with Magento 1.

5) Your Website Will Get Slower, Poor User Experience

We’re sure your current Magento 1 is working great! But without regular security patches, bug fixes, performance upgrades, and more it’s going to get worse. And that’s just a fact.

There are a limited number of optimizations available to improve your Magento 1 website, in contrast to, Magento 2 that comes loaded with features and functionality out-of-the-box.

Magento 1 End of Life means that your website is going to be slower, buggy, and prone to errors and other issues, leading to poor user experience and fewer sales.

Don’t Let Magento 1 End Of Life Impact Your Business — Start The Migration Process ASAP

There are quite a few different (bad) things that will happen to your website and business if you continue using Magento 1 after its End Of Life in June 2020.

So, how to handle this? Migrate to Magento 2 or other platforms like Shopify. It’s a huge improvement over Magento 1 — and your business deserves the best e-commerce platform.

As a leading e-commerce agency, we know that migrating your Magento store may seem intimidating but ioVista is here to help you. Our team of certified developers specializes in Magento 2 migrations for businesses of all sizes.

Don’t wait.

Make sure your Magento 1 website is safe and running on Magento 2 or any other e-commerce platform much before June 30, 2020.