Pratikkumar P. Gaikwad | 05 min read | Nov 20, 2019

Table of Content

1. What’s Magento 2?
2. Magento 1 vs. Magento 2: What are Magento 2’s benefits?
- Improved performance
- Streamlined checkout process
- Better admin interface
- Mobile friendly
3. Is migration to Magento 2 compulsory?
4. Major obstacles in migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2
- Data migration issues
- Image migration issues
- Custom extension issues
- Theme and template issues

Magento has around 9 percent of the world’s e-commerce sites — and many of these users are at a crossroads: do we have to move to Magento 2 or explore other ecommerce platform again? After the purchase of Magento by Adobe for $1.68 billion, a lot has been addressed about how this deal could transform the whole eCommerce environment. Of course, we can see that Magento now uses Adobe’s cloud technologies and design tools to create a lot of potential. Nevertheless, Magento is an independent eCommerce platform at this time of writing.

And while Magento 2 is far superior to its predecessor, Magento 1’s migration process is complicated and can lead to hair-pulling frustration.

1. What’s Magento 2 ?

Magento 2 is the latest version of an eCommerce platform used by one in four companies. Released back in 2015, thanks to its revised user-friendly interface, Magento 2 was welcomed with open arms from their dedicated fans.

Magento 2 has three different editions

Magento 2 Open Source

(formerly known as Community Edition) — This is the free version that matches small businesses and companies requirements wanting to build up from the ground up.

Magento 2 Business Version

A customized edition targeted for small and medium-sized businesses. It has all the features found in the version of the Open Source but comes with additional features including comprehensive management tools and marketing options. Prices beginning at $22,000 a year for using this version, which is significantly higher than most SaaS (Software-as – a-Service) systems.

Business Cloud Version

This SaaS solution removes self-hosting constraints and offers the same functionality as the Enterprise edition. Prices are estimated to be even higher than the Enterprise Edition to use this product.

Most eCommerce brands tend to choose the Open Source version because of the price. Only 9 percent of Magento 2 users use the Enterprise Edition based on recent data from BuiltWith.

2. Magento 1 vs. Magento 2: What are Magento 2’s benefits?

Magento 1 was originally constructed as a flexible platform for eCommerce. Flexibility was a key characteristic and one reason why Magento 1 first became so popular. But with time, as designers from Magento began to work on improving their eCommerce platform’s versatility, the user interface became less user-friendly.

Magento 1 also skipped certain critical features found on many competing platforms for eCommerce. Functionality such as monitoring of performance and mobile responsiveness are lacking. And many users complained about how slowly their eCommerce page was running — resulting in customer and visitor losses..

Admittedly, there are some helpful features in the current Magento 2 system that solves all the problems found in Magento 1 above.

Some of the results are:

Improved performance

On average, Magento 2 runs 20 percent faster compared to Magento 1. Site speeds have been shown to encourage more search engines sales and help sites rank better.

Streamlined checkout process

The checkout process for Magento 1 consisted of 6 stages, only 2 for Magento 2.

Better admin interface

Perhaps Magento 1’s most important pain point was its admin design. Non-technical consumers had a lot of trouble working through the system. Magento 2 launched a user-friendly simpler interface that allows users to find apps or add new product listings even quicker.

Mobile friendly

The best performance on mobile devices could not be provided by a Magento 1 site Magento 2 acknowledged this phenomenon of 62 percent of consumers making purchases from their smartphone and rendered app sensitivity a focus on their platform

While we can see the benefits of Magento’s latest incarnation, the harsh reality is that transitioning from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is a time-consuming and challenging task. This raises the question:

3. Is migration to Magento 2 compulsory?

In short, the answer is yes.

Since November 2015, Magento 2 has been available. But according to Salmon, Magento 1 is still being used by many companies — but it won’t be much longer.
That’s because Magento announced back in February 2017 that support for Magento 1 would end in November 2018. This has, though, been expanded recently to June 2020 as long as permits have been renewed to comply with that year.
Nonetheless, the days of Magento 1 are counted.

4. Major obstacles in migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2

In many cases, it is a relatively smooth operation to switch from a discontinued software version to its newest incarnation. Nevertheless, switching from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is not an update to an existing system’s newer version, but a full move to another system altogether.
If you are contemplating moving to Magento 2, there are some things that need to be addressed once you make the move — and before you can upgrade to Magento 3 in a couple of years. Here are the biggest problems to be worried about.

Data migration issues

The migration requires the export and formatting of the Magento 1 data to fit the table structures of the Magento 2 database.

Image migration issues

It is necessary to manually move images and media files, including photos, audio files and video files from the old system to the new setup.

Custom extension issues

Such plugins will not be allowed in Magento 2 for developers utilizing custom extensions for their Magento 1 framework, and developers will need to update their modules to comply with the new system.

Theme and template issues

The unique themes and models created by developers for Magento 1 will not fit in Magento 2, so much so that the design work will need to be redone from Square One’s.

Migration to Magento 2 is “20 percent larger” than the average Magento 1.x upgrade, according to the Magento migration overview — and this does not take into account the above issues. All of these things mean that you, as a Magento 2 client, will be left operating in their live environments on Magento 1, whilst restoring everything on a production database in Magento 2 until these problems were ironed out, which could take months. And, worse yet, they may be unfixable problems that may contribute to the restoration of custom plugins or the destruction of your website model.