'Figure Out' 16 Reasons to Migrate to Magento 2 from your old Magento 1 Store

Magento 2 has been a phenomenal e-commerce force in a year or so— credits to the Magento team who understands that the success of online stores depends on the type of technology stack they use.

The popularity of Magento stores skyrocketing across the past decade has pushed Magento to opt for several upgrades throughout its timeline, and you can call Magento 2 as “the daddy of all the upgrades“. They have taken the responsibility just at the right time by bringing the futuristic and modern-day changes to make our eCommerce stores future-ready.

Having said about the greatness and power of Magento 2, a lot of people aren’t convinced of this crucial transition because it may consume a lot of time, obviously in addition to the dollar bills. If you are one such owner who hasn’t found reasons to migrate store from Magento 1 to Magento 2, I will give you briefs about “why you should migrate?” and “what are Magento 2 Migration benefits ?” respectively.

So, without further ado, let’s take at both of them one by one.

Why you should migrate to Magento 2?

This portion covers why you’ll have to migrate to Magento 2 from your existing Magento store despite your unwillingness.

Here’re they:

• Magento 1 is an inch away from the end of life

Magento has announced that it will no longer support Magento 1 by the end of June 2020. The end of life date has already been extended by 18 months, and Magento seems stern on its decisions this time.

The lack of technical support and updates on Magento 1 will cripple the store performance and make it vulnerable to external interceptions. And that brings us to the second reason why you will have to shift to Magento 2.

• You are violating PCI rules.

For a successful and secure user-experience, your store should meet the PCI guidelines. When you are running an eCommerce business, the onus lies on you to secure the user credentials. The shutting of Magento 1 services will have a significant security threat as it may fail to prevent modern-day attacks on such credentials, thereby compelling you to breach the PCI rules. Migrating to Magento 2 makes sense because non-compliance can cost you hefty, and it’s better to fritter away your money in the right direction.

• More Magento 2 Migration, fewer agencies.

If you haven’t planned to transfer your store to the newer version of Magento, you might get late by the time its life ends. The popularity of Magento can easily be determined by its announcement of keeping the Magento 1 on the ventilator.

Magento store owners are going frenzy looking for alternative solutions that can guarantee them a similar share of success in a brief span.

According to the 2020 stats, there are more than a quarter a million live Magento sites which operate on Magento 1, and only 11,000 have migrated to Magento 2. Click To Tweet

[Source: Hostingtribunal ]

As the migrating trend has slowly caught traction, the world is suddenly running short of Magento 2 experts and agencies who can actually convert their dreams into reality. Agencies bottleneck is all the more reason why you’ll have to make a decision now because further delay might not work well with the store.

• You’ll lose the competitive advantage.

If not today, you’ll have to migrate in the future because your competitors are migrating anyway. Clinging to the old Magento will lead to a considerable drop in page ranking on the search engine, affect your internet visibility, and give your competitors a distinct advantage over you.

Also Read: What happens if you continue to use magento 1.X after june 2020

However, a more advanced decision to convert to Magento 2 will ensure that you remain in the league of other competing giants of your industry. Well, these are the reasons why you will have to migrate in the future.

So, what are the choices you have?

1. Upgrading to another CMS

Many store owners may be planning to shift to an entirely new CMS because of their unsatisfactory experience with Magento 1. Some would like to go for WordPress and its likes because they can reap the benefit of numerous free and paid plugins. You can pick another CMS for yourself, too; however, migration is not a two-fingers job.

With such a huge undertaking, you may risk providing the best customer experience and looking at the history of security and agility— other CMS are not immune to threats.

2. Upgrading to Magento 2

Upgrading to Magento 2 can be as tedious as migrating to any other CMS because it has its separate architecture on which your store will have to be re-designed from scratch. There’s no if’s and but’s about the fact that Magento 2 is the most potent, upgraded, and irresistible eCommerce platform as of now— but data migration will take as much time as when you pick another CMS.

Also Read : Magento 1 to Magento 2 Migration Cost & Timeline Explanation

However, Magento has developed a migrating tool which can transfer data (except media files) by file mapping technique, and that makes the process a tad simpler. Now you may be intrigued that if Magento 2 migration will take as much time as opting for any other CMS, why should you even choose it? Well, here’s the catch— Magento 2 is ladened with dynamic upgrades which tell ‘why should you migrate to it.’

And this gets us to the next portion— why should you migrate to it?

What are Magento 2 Migration Benefits?

There are more 16 Magento 2 Migration Reasons, why we recommended you to migrate your Magento 1.x old store to the latest Magento 2.x to leverage more benefits and perks.

1. Great mobile experience
2. Killer SEO solutions
3. Swiftness with ajax shopping cart
4. Built-in superfast varnish caching system
5. Multi-functional admin dashboard and smooth navigation
6. Easy and cheap installation of extensions
7. Integration made a piece of cake
8. Well organized frictionless checkouts
9. Relevant searches made easy with elasticsearch
10. Three separate master databases
11. Streamlined product uploads
12. Personalized customization
13. Fewer system requirements
14. Brilliant performance throughout
15. Hardwired security features
16. Amazing testing framework for fixing compatibility issues

Let’s explore all Magento 2 Migration Reasons one by one and find out why it’s worth switching to Magento 2.

#1 GREAT MOBILE EXPERIENCE:

As the number of smartphone users almost turns to a whopping 45% of the global population, there’s no difference of opinion that mobile will leeway maximum online transactions in the coming years. In fact, it’s estimated that by… Click To Tweet

[Source: Bankmycell ] Since the number of transactions concentrates down to the 4’ shrunk devices, it calls for the type of eCommerce stores which can produce mobile-friendly experience.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 is one of the best-suited platforms for building mobile-friendly eCommerce solutions. It provides a lot of mobile optimization tools that can lay the path for responsive front-end design. And while providing that, it also offers everything that you should have for developing a desktop-centric store.

 

#2 KILLER SEO SOLUTIONS:

As of 2020, 70% of digital marketers consider SEO the heart of any online business. [Source: Impactbnd ] The thirst for getting into the first page of the search result can never die as it continues to behave as an essential element in sales conversion. And as the first five results get more than 67% of the global clicks, anyone would pick SEO as their best marketing friend. As proper SEO-techniques continue to impress organic traffic, you’d want your store to be SEO-friendly.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

The default Magento 2 is known to support decent on-page SEO needs. In fact, there are a lot of inbuilt SEO benefits that it offers, and you may have to spend some time exploring them. Upgrades such as responsive designs on all the platforms, presence of metadata, support towards unique content with canonical tag, etc. will surely take care of your SEO despite the migration.

 

#3 SWIFTNESS WITH AJAX SHOPPING CART:

A lot of users have to face problems with Magento 1 based stores because every time they add a product in their shopping cart, the store reloads automatically. In the worst case, auto-reloads may last more than 3 to 5 seconds, which can disrupt the shopping-experience.

Stats reveal that inconvenient shopping-experience leads to 39% of shopping cart abandonment. Moreover, 60% of users abandon those websites, which have slow load time as much as three or more seconds. What’s more dangerous is that… Click To Tweet

[ Source: 99firms ] Since you don’t want these sales threatening numbers to affect your store, Magento 2 has just another good excuse to be used.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 obliterates the said pain point of Magento 1 by offering AJAX shopping cart software, which enhances your store’s usability. It allows shoppers to add products to their cart from the category page without having to face page reload irritation again and again. Since AJAX uses JavaScript and XML to modify only the content of the shopping cart and not the entire page— the users can carry on their shopping— without any page disturbance. As it floors a seamless shopping experience, it results in more conversion. Here’s the brownie point— you don’t have to install a separate module for this.

 

#4 BUILT-IN SUPERFAST VARNISH CACHING SYSTEM:

Amazon has calculated that slowing down page load just by a second may cost them over $1.6 billion annually. Similarly, Google suspects that by slowing the search results only by 2/5th of a second will lead to 8 million fewer searches every day. [ Source: FastCompany ]

The above stats speak volumes about how poor customer experience can lead to a drop in sales and revenue. More so because 47% of users want websites to load in 2 secs or less [ Source: Eggplantsoftware ].

80% of the customers feel that a slow site is more pain in the neck than a temporarily down webpage. Click To Tweet[ Source: NeilPatel ] As users have high expectations from the stores they have been transacting with— you can’t really leave this corner of expectation unfulfilled.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 uses the Varnish Caching system for accelerating the speed of the website. The caching technique has been one of the strongest long-proven moves for accelerating the load speed of any website. But E-commerce stores depend on it much more than any other website type because page load time has everything to do with the customer experience and eventually, the sales. Varnish caching system caches the page elements of frequently accessed web pages and caters to these elements for fantastic site performance. The proven duo of Varnish Magento helps deliver brilliant user experience, and its in-built support makes it a brilliant fit as an HTTP accelerator.

 

#5 MULTI-FUNCTIONAL ADMIN DASHBOARD AND SMOOTH NAVIGATION:

Magento 1 has had past issues with logging into the admin panel, and once you somehow made it to the page, it wouldn’t load at all. It also offered fewer admin modules in a single place, along with poor admin navigation. That breaks the intuitiveness from the developer’s perspective. And psychological studies reveal that developers on non-intuitive platforms may not bring the best output for the users. Fortunately, the latest upgraded version of Magento 2 resolves all the issues with the admin panel.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

The admin dashboard of Magento 2 has multi-functional modules that enable crucial business information at a snap of fingers. All the modules are concentrated at a commonplace, which makes the entire developing and information fetching process seamless and intuitive. You can track down the financial performances of your business effortlessly merely by going through the financial data module present in the dashboard.

Here’s the detail of the information you can get from the dashboard.

• average order amount,
• last orders placed,
• frequently searched terms,
• most viewed products,
• lifetime sales,
• new customers, etc.

Moreover, the admin panel in Magento 2 greets e-store owners through a welcome feature.

The e-commerce owners who always had to face the complexity of navigation in the backend admin panel will take massive delight in using Magento 2 as it gets more streamlined and less clunky.

 

#6 EASY AND CHEAP INSTALLATION OF EXTENSIONS:

Although Magento 1 has a proven track record for custom-built modules to meet the store objectives, eCommerce merchants often have to go through installation and configuration errors. Furthermore, most of the extensions exploit your pockets when you want to diverge your budget into something constructive.

Adding worse to it, you don’t want to waste your time in finding the probability for installation and configuring rather than glorifying your sales path. Having said that, Magento 2 takes care of all the problems through easier and cheaper extension solutions.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Akin to Magento 1, Magento 2 has the potpourri of extensions that can make your e-commerce profile agile and profitable. Although you can’t migrate the extensions of Magento 1 to Magento 2, you can surely buy new ones from the store. Since the modules in Magento 2 are cheaper than those of Magento 1, you can get back the charm of your new store at a lower expense.

Furthermore, installing and configuring these extensions have become much easier with front-end development going simple. It’s a great mixture of old school scripts like HTML5, CSS3, and modern-day programs like require.js.

 

#7 INTEGRATION MADE A PIECE OF CAKE:

Magento supports third-party services like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Accounting, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), marketing automation systems, Product Information Management (PIM), etc., and they need a proper integration process for it.

Despite allowing such integration, there have been a lot of integration failures in the past. Integrations don’t go smoothly every time as the integration message gets lost due to the technical problems. Magento 1 doesn’t have the potential to track down these messages, and the integration process goes in vain.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 experts in relaying integration messages using RabbitMQ(Message Queue), and so far, their combination has done an incredible job. The Magento 2 Enterprise Edition uses this framework for monitoring and storing the integration message.

The framework ensures that communication between Magento and enterprise software remains established by storing the unsent messages and delivering them as early as possible for hassle-free integration.

 

#8 WELL ORGANIZED FRICTIONLESS CHECKOUTS:

Checkout is one of the most critical processes in defining the conversion rate. And no prizes for guessing that complex checkout processes face the wrath of “almost converted” customers. Stats demonstrate that long/complicated checkouts detest close to 25 users out of every 100. One of the other studies suggests that if we only work on the checkouts easy-usability— we will have 36% more conversion rate— which is almost like recovering $260 billion at the global level. [ Source: Baymard ] Fortunately, Magento 2 understands the vitality of frictionless checkouts.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Upgrading to Magento 2 will make your store more productive with streamlined checkouts, henceforth better customer-experience. Here’s what Magento 2 has to bestow with its checkout process.

• It permits customers to register after they have placed the order rather than compelling them to enter the details at the checkout process.
• Customers can view their order details at the last moment of the checkout process. That keeps them posted in the last few seconds of their final placement.
• The number of form elements is less. The customers have to go through fewer formalities. Thus, they don’t have to get pre-occupied with other stuff while they can focus on finishing the checkout process.
• PayPal integration has been made more straightforward for users. You don’t have to input additional details like the billing address that’s generally being handled by PayPal.
• The checkout process also has the sequence of product photos, which can provide an order summary while they go on with completing the checkout.

Magento 2 leaves no stone untouched to keep checkout processes informative yet simple, and that enhances overall shopping-experience and potentiates a higher conversion rate.

#9 RELEVANT SEARCHES MADE EASY WITH ELASTICSEARCH:

When you have a myriad of products in the store catalog, searching can be a difficult maze to crack. Your customers want to get the relevant searches in a short span as they don’t have an entire day to give you.

Research has shown that 43% of visitors immediately go to the search box to find their favorite items. And 12% of these users will abandon your store because somehow you didn’t work on offering a good search-experience. Click To Tweet

[ Source: Algolia ] Don’t worry! Magento 2 can rescue your store with this problem too.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 Enterprise Edition uses Elasticsearch technology, which is a scalable text search engine. It ‘s known to enhance the search qualities, thereby stitching a much-required visitor-experience. It can handle extensive volume catalog searches and helps in analyzing the considerable size of the data bank in almost real-time. It supports a whopping 33 languages, which can be translated into common and simpler global languages. It also says goodbye to problems such as misspelled and synonym words.

Apart from that, it auto-detects the search string even if you haven’t typed the entire word, i.e., it has the in-built auto-completer. As Elasticsearch gives searching powers to the users— there’s no doubt that Magento 2 stores will perform exceedingly well in terms of conversion.

 

#10 THREE SEPARATE MASTER DATABASES:

Magento 1 has a database overloading problem that drops down the performance of your site. As e-Commerce stores are dynamic websites, they have to execute a lot of queries for every page that’s been requested. And if the requests aren’t met, the conversion rate of your store may get a significant blow.

It usually happens when developers, customers, and website administrators, use the same database for a particular Magento e-commerce store. But Magento 2 provides several scalability benefits when it comes to using these databases.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 scales up your store by offering three separate master databases, and interestingly, you can use each one of them for different functional areas. You can use these separate databases for orders, checkout, and product data, and that will reduce the amount of request pressure on the common database.

The primary purpose of three separate databases is to make the shopping experience smooth despite merchandising activities in the background.

 

#11 STREAMLINED PRODUCT UPLOADS:

eCommerce stores have a wide range of products, and they always have to deal with complex product uploading modules. There’s no doubt that products and their descriptions contribute to higher conversion. Some anecdotes also prove that not merchandising your product using more relatable content like videos can affect your sales.

Lack of opportunities for merchandising products on the store front-end has been a problem for most e-commerce building platforms; however, Magento 2 makes sure that you have a simplified product uploading.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 facilitates product upload through a series of simplified steps. You can easily import the products and product details in the database, which will be reflected in the storefront. Besides that, it also allows you to merchandise your items by linking your video content from YouTube and Vimeo to the store.

 

 #12 PERSONALIZED CUSTOMIZATION:

Your customers want to feel at home when they are dealing with your store— at least the personalization stats indicate that.

80% of the customers are likely to buy from the stores which proffer customized experience. Click To Tweet

Marketers have also shown their concerns about impersonalized stores. They say that average sales dip by 20% if the store owners didn’t work in building more humane-experience. [ Source: Instapage ]

Nevertheless, Magento 2 sweeps away this persisting headache, which has dragged down not only the customer-experience but the overall brand image.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 excels in yielding a personalized environment for your customers. You can offer personalized schemes and discounts for easy retention, up-sell and cross-sell offers for increasing the average order value, and a lot more with Magento 2’s advanced promotion rule builder.

The platform also allows you to monitor client’s behavior— both at real-time and cached— so that you can control the visibility of content, gift coupons, promotional offers, and many more to the respective customers.

 

#13 FEWER SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

Magento 1 needs a pool of hardware and software systems— everyone knows that. And you have to bear its huge cost. You also have to spend more if you need even more satisfying developing experience— and that has always been a worrying trend with M1. But Magento 2 saves you a few dollar bills here as well.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 has fewer systemic requirements, and the best part about it is— it produces the same level of performance at a low cost. Apart from being a cost-effective platform, the fewer system requirements see to it that your integration goes smoothly without much friction.

 

#14 BRILLIANT PERFORMANCE THROUGHOUT:

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Despite getting massive traction, we can’t ignore the fact that Magento 1 had a lot of performance issues.

It could only handle limited orders per hour, had delayed response times for catalog viewing, almost dead add-to-cart server response time, guest checkouts at a snail’s pace, etc. The list would just go on and on.

Magento 2 handles all the performance issues with ease.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

A lot of use cases have demonstrated that Magento 2 brings a radical performance change for all the eCommerce websites. [ Source: Magento ]

In fact, some stats affirm that for large enterprises, it can:

• Process 39% more order per hour [almost equal to 2500 orders per hour]
• Increase the response time for Catalog pages views.
• Fasten add-to-cart server response times by 66% [almost under 500 milliseconds]
• Accelerate guest checkout response times by 51%
• Enhance customer checkout response times by a massive 36%.
• Magnify page load speed to almost double the pace.
• Handle million page views and traffic without going down at essential hours.

 

#15 HARDWIRED SECURITY FEATURES:

Security sits at the hierarchy of customer’s concerns when they are making an online purchase. They will always be worried about their credentials leakage and payment security. And that’s why…

61% of customers don’t purchase from the stores which don’t put trust logos on their websites. Click To Tweet

[ Source: Shopify ]

You have to win their trust by following security guidelines and safeguarding the customer’s interest. And Magento 2 helps you win their trust.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 is jam-packed with security features. It uses a reliable data encryption technique that shields passwords and sensitive information linked with payment, shipping, credit/debit cards. Following the secure footstep of the AES-256 algorithm and robust hashing method— SHA-256, the store decrypts the information. It will generate an automatic encryption key that can be used for encrypting this data; however, it grants you the privilege to choose your key as per your need.

 

#16 AMAZING TESTING FRAMEWORK FOR FIXING COMPATIBILITY ISSUES:

The level of development on Magento 1 is beyond par the level of testing. M1 uses Regression Testing for screening bugs; however, the experience hasn’t been all rainbows and sunshine so far now. The testing accuracy drops to another level in M1 when you are using complex and customized features and extensions on your website.

And it’s one of the critical processes for minimizing the risk. It can’t be neglected— especially when you are getting massive traffic. Magento 2 lets you get over these bugs quickly.

How Magento 2 achieve this?

Magento 2 has an in-built testing framework. The idea of having it within the platform is to test codes at the microscopic level.

You can run automated tests on the websites for identifying bugs at each level of development and even after deployment— and that stands true for the site of any size and complexities.

 

The Ultimate Call…

Now that you know “why you have to migrate” and “why you should migrate” to Magento 2.x with our ultimate list of Magento 2 Migration Reasons, the ball lies on your court.

It’s on you whether you want to create an actionable roadmap for one of the most significant revolutionary changes in the Magento history or want to stick to the same outmoded platform which can cost you business.

Just in case if you have made your mind for the migration after reading this Magento 2 Migration Reasons, you can reach us at our email handle.

How we can help you

Looking at the long list of Magento 2 Migration Requirements, the kind of complexities you may have to bear, and the intensity of efforts you may have to put during the process— you might want to get Magento experts for assistance.

We have such spirited Magento developers and competent migrating experts who can take up all your headache, and deliver the Magento e-commerce objective at the negotiated time and cost. As we have been serving as Magento veterans in the industry for more than 12+ years— we take your time, budget, and urgency into account; and arrange the most optimal Magento solution so that your nose ahead among your competitors.

We also provide 3 months of free Magento 2 Technical Support for all the Magento projects as we believe in delivering seamless client-experience. To add value to your global reach, we make sure that we aren’t trading off your SEO ranking while migrating your store. We keep your rankings and visibility intact while we upgrade an entirely new “feel-good” web-commerce for you

For further details, shoot your queries at our email handle as we are happy to assist via the contact form.