Letting your site go stale is not an option in the eCommerce world. Rapid innovations bring change, safety measures advance, and customers expect an up-to-date website whenever they visit. If the fact that support for Magento 1 will be ending soon isn’t reason enough to upgrade, let’s talk about how making the change will actually take your business to the next level. We’re going to start with a breakdown of Magento 1 vs Magento 2.
What is Magento 2?
Released in 2008, Magento quickly became one of the most well-known eCommerce platforms out there. While the platform has consistently been vigorous, ground-breaking and highlight-rich, there were a few disadvantages that caused headaches for users. Chief among these were its speed. As response times have grown more critical in the retention of customers, Magento began to rethink its entire approach and, in its decision to use an advanced web stack for its next iteration, came up with a solution that would prove to be hard to ignore.
Magento 2 propelled to the forefront of the eCommerce world in November 2015, making a major splash. It’s not just a redesign of Magento 1; it’s an entirely different platform that incorporates dynamic research around the restrictions users faced with Magento 1.
Adobe has since declared that they will be suspending support for Magento 1 in June of 2020 and with that, the opportunity has arrived to upgrade to a Magento 2 site. When support ends, all eCommerce sites on Magento 1 will still work, but there will be no patches or new highlights to take advantage of, and any fixes will be viewed as custom-work which could potentially wind up costing businesses significantly more.
On top of all that, many plugins and extensions will likely phase out their support with the Magento 1 framework while others are already offering expansions solely for Magento 2. The fact of the matter is—Magento 1 won’t be around forever. As time goes on, increasingly serious storekeepers on Magento 2 will have an unmistakable advantage over those who are still utilizing Magento 1.
While we recommend you start planning for a website overhaul, you should ask yourself a few questions first. The change will require help and it’s worth considering a few things before deciding how you should go about it:
• Do you have a list of big changes you need to make to your store?
In case you’re contemplating usefulness or re-theming at any point in the near future, we recommend that you go for the overhaul first. This will save you from re-doing a lot of the work when you eventually change platforms over to Magento 2.
• Are you looking to expand your sales?
Magento 2 has an assortment of streamlining options built in to help with driving sales volumes and conversion rates up. (We’ll investigate these further down below.)
• How forward-looking is your industry?
Are your rivals running complex stores with fast page load speeds and simple-to-utilize checkout forms? Would stalling an overhaul end up costing your more in the long run due to lost customers?
• Are you in a position where your staff will have the option to relearn Magento?
While Magento 1 and Magento 2 have a lot of similarities, they are still completely different platforms that will require some time learning the new framework. If this is a busy season for you, and taking time to acclimate yourself to a new framework isn’t something you can do at the moment, it might be smarter to hold off until a later date. That said, we caution against waiting too long – after 2020, Magento 1 won’t have any further security patches released which will leave sites vulnerable going forward.
What are the advantages of changing to Magento 2?
Speed
One of the disadvantages of Magento 1 has consistently been its moderate stacking time. Stores found workarounds with fixes that could be added to help support speed, however that often required extra support, which ended up being an additional cost for storekeepers. Magento 2, on the other hand, takes the front-end experience and dramatically improves speed all around leaving customers happier with their experiences.
How quick is Magento 2?
We recently migrated one customer to Magento 2 and saw an immediate speed improvement. Our engineer shared:
“On a base Digital Ocean box, we were seeing page heaps of ~500ms versus 1.5 seconds on their old site.”
There is no overstating the benefits of a snappier site. Google will position sites higher when they’re quicker, and customers are inclined to stay with a store that doesn’t take long to stack.
Ease of use
Additionally, Magento has decided to concentrate on the backend administrator portion of their foundation, making the ability to absorb information simpler for clients who don’t have an in-depth level of specialized knowledge. Store the board forms have become easier and less tedious, too.
One new component we’re excited about is the capacity to mass-altar items. As Magento head supervisors know, the procedure of mass-altering was lumbering and tedious with Magento 1. Magento 2 smooths out the whole procedure making the process of item-creation less complex and speedier. The number of item formats have been reduced and administrators can make configurable items at the same time. There’s a bit-by-bit item creation function included, and item import is altogether quicker than in Magento 1.
The new backend administrator is laid out in a cutting-edge style and is streamlined for a wider range of screen sizes. This lets us know that it is touch-accommodating for clients who like to work from their tablets, cell phones or touchscreen PCs.
Checkout
Checkout procedures can be an important determiner of change rates. Easy and simple checkout forms induce more requests while a cumbersome checkout procedure can bring about higher abandoned cart rates.
Within Magento 1, a customer must advance through five steps before they’re ready to submit their checkout form. If a dealer or store needed to offer anything speedier or more intuitive, special customization was required. With Magento 2, on the other hand, the checkout process has been reduced to two stages. What’s more, Magento 2 has made the checkout procedure adaptable for storekeepers.
To smooth out the procedure, a request rundown is shown all through checkout, which means a customer doesn’t need to refer back to their shopping basket to see their items. Expected Guest Checkout is applied, so clients who enrolled beforehand on the site are perceived by their email address and given the alternative to sign in to finish their exchange. Visitors are given the choice to make an account after they’ve just presented their request, so account creation doesn’t hinder the progression of the checkout procedure.
Payment Gateways
Magento 2 coordinates with some of the best-known payment gateways out-of-the-box, giving clients adaptability, security, speed, and simplicity. This improves customer’s understanding during the checkout procedure and creates trust in eCommerce destinations. These payment gateways include:
- Paypal
- Authorize.net
- Braintree
- Square Payments
- Cybersource (Enterprise edition)
- Worldpay (Enterprise edition)
Loading time on Magento 2 will likewise be improved, as installment doors no longer require combinations but are instead promptly accessible. Traders will likewise more effectively have the option to satisfy PCI-consistent guidelines.
Extra Magento 2 Highlights:
- Better search functionality, including layered search and navigation options.
- The ability to offer private sales (Enterprise Edition).
- Improved customer account management tools.
Magento 2 Developer Perks
Magento 2 is known for being more engineer-friendly than Magento 1. Test groups placed a high value on the following:
Maintenance and Upgrades
Magento 2 is designed to be more straightforward to update than Magento 1. This makes engineers’ jobs simpler, and can save your business cash.
Testing
Another big feature for engineers is the built-in testing system that accompanies Magento 2. This vastly streamlines the testing procedure, particularly when contrasted with what Magento 1 advertised. Relapse testing is a basic piece of pushing large updates for any eCommerce store, as it allows engineers to guarantee that changes don’t break the site. Magento 2 enables engineers to devise an assortment of tests, saving time in the testing phase.
Database
With Magento 2, the database across the board has also improved. In the previous form of Magento, insufficient burden adjusting was a common complaint, but now there’s an option to have databases function as self-sufficient elements.
In Magento 2 traffic is taken care of to the benefit of all with devoted assets that can be apportioned to guests who are visiting shops to purchase.
When all is said and done, Magento 2 is a smoother design built first and foremost to be open and versatile with a code base that allows for customizations to be implemented in a simpler, speedier way. Because of this, we recommend making the migration to Magento 2 sooner rather than later. The advantages the platform brings – financially, user friendliness, speed of use – will be unmistakable over both the short and long terms.
Ready to talk more about migrating and what that entails? We’d love to set up a time to go over all your questions and talk through the steps your store would need to take. Reach out to us at: sales@commercepundit.com or call us at 678.444.2112
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