Developed by Varien in 2008 and later sold to Adobe in 2018, Magento Commerce is a leading eCommerce platform. Used globally by all sizes of businesses, the Magento platform allows for the creation of engaging and interactive online marketplaces.
With extensive capabilities and functionality out of the box, Magento is a great choice for any business looking to provide an online store for their customers.
In 2015, Adobe released Magento 2, intended to take over from Magento 1 with new capabilities, fixes, security features and a ground-up rework of the platform itself to bring it in line with new technologies and development practices.
As such, Adobe stopped providing support and updates for Magneto 1 in June 2020, hoping to encourage their users to migrate to Magento 2.
This means thousands of businesses are now running an outdated version with potential security risks and no further performance updates. As expected, organisations are scrambling to upgrade to Magento 2.
Of course, a new platform means new features to get your head around. So, what are the main differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2? Keep reading to find out.
A major complaint about Magento 1 was the slow loading speeds.
Google has confirmed that eCommerce sites should load pages within 2 seconds, or risk their prospects bouncing off and going to a different store.
It is a real challenge to get Magento 1 sites to meet this target, and with site speed now a Google ranking factor, it can damage your bottom line by losing your search rankings. Thanks to numerous performance revisions and upgrades, Magento 2 offers 25% faster site speeds compared to Magento 1 on average.
For larger sites, Magento 2 can cope with 10 million page views per hour, which is a vast improvement over Magento 1’s 200,000.
Finally, with Magento 2 able to process 39% more orders per hour, it’s clear that Magento 2 wins out when it comes to your business’ bottom line.
Despite getting all the extra capabilities of Magento 2, the cost compared to Magento 1 is pretty similar.
The Magento Community Edition is open source, which means the platform itself is 100% free. For many businesses, this version will provide for all of their needs, but if you have a particularly large online store, Magento Enterprise offers more power-user features, such as complex SEO tools, full page caching, security features, marketing tools, and more readily available support options.
Magento Enterprise can cost anywhere between £17,000 to £25,000 a year.
One thing to bear in mind with both editions is that you will need a developer or a specialist Magento 2 agency to actually create and maintain the site. Unlike platforms like WordPress, Magento is more sophisticated, thus requiring specialist knowledge to set up and maintain.,
ITQ specialises in Magento development and can help you migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2 with little disruption to your business operations.
Not only does poor security put your customers at risk, it can also put your business at risk by opening doors into your confidential data and exposing you to fines from failing to adhere to legal requirements like GDPR.
Although secure when it was supported, Magento 1 is no longer receiving security updates. As such, it has less protection against new and upcoming threats. This is only going to get worse as the platform gets older.
Magento 2 is quite new and still receives regular security updates to match the changing digital environment.
As your digital store becomes the lifeblood of your company, even small outages in the service can have severe consequences for your bottom line. When issues do arise, you want to be able to reach out to an expert as quickly as possible.
Although well supported in its time, Magento 1 no longer receives updates or support services. Consequently,, you are now largely on your own if you are still on the Magento 1 platform. This means any issues with your store can be much harder to resolve and potentially present costly delays.
On the other hand, Magento 2 has a wide range of support options still available, including troubleshooting guides, community forums, FAQs, how-tos, support tools, and direct customer service support. This means you are far likely to resolve issues quickly and protect your business from any downtime.
This refers to the underlying framework of code which your store runs on. Although you may never see this code as an end user, it has a direct impact on your store experience and performance.
The Magento 1 platform is now outdated and lacks many modern website features, such as PHP7, HTML 5 and various server types and configurations.
Magento 2 remedies this with full support for PHP7, HTML 5, Zend Framework 1 & 2 and various server-side technologies such as NGINX, Composer, Varnish, Symfony and Redis. Although these features will make little difference to the end user, your developers will appreciate the new capabilities and flexibility.
Sat behind your storefront, accessible in the admin pages, is the dashboard which gives you an overview of your store’s performance.
Both Magento 1 and Magento 2 aren’t known for their user-friendly backends. Although powerful, the admin systems can be overwhelming to new users and present a steep learning curve unless you are eased into the new admin by a competent Magento 2 trainer.
However, Magento 2 has improved upon Magento 1 by offering new widgets and features to make performance monitoring much easier. The new UI also does away with the more clunky features, giving a much more streamlined experience.
For your store to be competitive on Google and other search engines, SEO consideration is an absolute must. Although often given to dedicated SEO experts and agencies,
Magento 2 offers many more features which will make their lives easier. In return, you get better rankings in search engines, more traffic, and more revenue.
With 60-80% of searches performed on mobile devices, it is no wonder that sites are starting to move to a “mobile first” design ethic. Google has also jumped on this, ranking mobile friendly sites higher. As such a site optimised for mobile is likely to perform better and boost your profits.
Magento 1 was a lot more rigid than Magento 2 in terms of site design possibilities. This meant it was hard to create a good looking mobile Magento site, and even harder to make it fast! Magento 2 expands on the features of Magento 1 and allows much more flexibility to design sites from the ground up or kissing well proven design themes with mobile in mind.
Depending on the scope and size of your store, it can take anywhere from 1-6 months to complete a migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Upgrading Magento is not as simple as updating the version. Magento 1 and 2 are completely different platforms and should be considered as separate systems. As such, a Magento 2 migration involves literally moving across all your data, products, theming etc and converting them into formats which are compatible with Magento 2.
This is a time consuming process and can cause large problems with your store if not conducted by experts such as those at ITQ Digital.
There is much more to migrating to Magento 2 than just doing a regular update. It requires building a shop from the ground up based on completely different,
modern software. Here are just some things that you need to look out for:
At ITQ Digital, we strongly recommend using an experienced Magento developer to oversee and enact your migration from
Magento 1 to Magento 2 from start to finish.
Why not book in an informal call to have a chat about your Magento 1 site and the options for upgrading to Magento 2?
Find out more about our Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration service