Why Migrating to Magento 2 Now Is More Important Than Ever

Magento has been the center of discussion for the e-commerce community. With its latest update and the upcoming one in June, online retailers must make a decision that will change their e-commerce presence forever. Now, with the support expiring, Magento 1.9x users will no longer receive security updates or other support for their platforms, putting them on a huge risk of store malfunction and security breach.

But like all software, Magento has been continuously evolving to maintain its competitive edge over other e-commerce platforms. With its version 2, Magento has taken the selling and shopping experience leaps ahead, offering some of the most advanced and user-friendly features to boost its e-commerce platform. These 8 upgrades are everything to convince you to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

1. Improved Load Speed

In the Magento 1x versions, a dozen of JS had to be loaded for building a single page. Taking this into account, the developers tweaked the code in Magento 2, allowing the pages to load much faster. To further reduce the page load time, the JavaScript bundling has been enabled with the move from prototype JS to JQuery. This has streamlined the flow of operations and minimized the page load time significantly.

2. Latest Technology Stack

By upgrading its minimum versions of the technology stack, PHP 5.5 is now the minimum version supported just as HTML 5, MySQL 5.6, CSS3 and other supporting technologies which makes it rich in performance.

3. Faster Customization

Magento developers also realized the importance of customization and restructured the code base so a single directory can manage everything specific to the particular module. By using the current PHP package manager, Magento 2 can now manage the installation of modules more effectively than ever. So that everything can be customized with ease even when the patches are installed, the presentation logic and business logic were separated.

4. Superior Performance and Scalability

The built-in full page cache is perhaps the most amazing feature for Magento 2, allows it to support varnish as back-end and significantly reduces load time. With the new improved FPC, the home page, product page, and category page that have a load speed of 1.5 seconds will be further reduced to 0.75 seconds per page when the cache is enabled. The PHP code will also be compiled on the fly since Magento 2 is compatible with HHVM 3.6 and varnish 4. Another reason why Magento 2 is a lot faster than M1 is because most of the front-end gets pre-compiled or loaded by AJAX. Moreover, database sharing can be done by functional area for example if a product information is being searched, it retrieves that information even if it is stored on a different server. Similarly, the checkout information can be stored on a different server which makes the checkout process faster and much smoother, directly complimenting scalability.

5. Cleaner Code Base

Another major advantage of migrating to Magento 2 is its modern codebase. Non-optimized code always puts the store in risk, and by removing the bad and legacy code, Magento 2 has allowed webmasters to easily audit. The existence of TinyMCE3 made it difficult to audit, especially in the core with its own library versions

6. Integration of Third-Party Extensions

Conflicts with third-party integrations were a common issue. With Magento 2’s well defined APIs, these modules can be easily accessed, allowing changes with the code internally without affecting the external functionality of the module. This has allowed coders and webmasters to customize and enhance the extensions for improving their performance.

7. Far Easier Staying Up to Date

Since the Magento was designed on the very principle of installing patches and making upgrades faster and easier, M2’s robust architecture has been specifically designed to keep the upgrades coming without breaking a sweat. With easier installations, the store security gets improved and the online retailers benefit from new functionalities and features precisely when they are released.

8. No More Extensive Testing 

The best part about Magento 2 is that it has been developed using automated test strategies with the most advanced protocols. This allows developers to prevent any conflicts with their core functionalities just by writing test cases for their customizations.

An open-source cross-platform solution ‘Magento Test Framework’ (MTF) is now used for functional testing. MTF allows developers to quickly produce functional tests for Magento applications at any time. Tests can be performed independently, multiple tests together, or all at the same time.

Migrate NOW!

Migrating to Magento 2 is not just imperative, but mandatory by order. After the new update in June, your Magento 1x stores will become vulnerable to hack attacks and security breaches. Moreover, if you are using third-party extensions, there will be a huge probability of malfunction since the most Magento extension providers have already migrated to the Magento 2 and the M1 extensions will no longer receive support or upgrades. Besides, it takes a minimum of 3 months to migrate and time is already of the essence.