The end of life for Magento 1

Magento 2.0 was released in November 2015 and was a considerable overhaul to the eCommerce platform. The new version resolved quite a lot of frustrations and added a variety of new features and improvements.

With the exciting new launch of their new product, Magento also announced that they would be discontinuing support for Magento 1. Unfortunately, these drastic changes meant that upgrading from Magento 1 to 2 was no small project.

When version 2 was announced back in 2015, there wasn't much concrete information about the 'end of life' for Magento 1. A lot of retailers have now already made the switch, but many still are on 1.9, daunted by the time and cost involved in migrating to the new version.

The official end of life for Magento 1 is June 2020 and after that, no security patches will be released.

So what else does end of life actually mean for your site?

As we have mentioned above, the end of support means the end of security patches and much more. Retailers still using Magento 1 will face with a variety of challenges such as:

• The majority of payment gateways require a quarterly PCI compliance scan. Without the security patches, your eCommerce store could potentially fail these PCI scans, leaving you unable to take payments from debit and credit cards as little as 90-days after support has ended.
• Handling the security patching yourself will be a tedious and extremely costly process. You'd be much better off spending that budget on re-platforming. This also eliminates the security risks.

We have decided that as an eCommerce agency, we won't be offering Magento 2 development services and instead are focusing on working with Shopify and Craft Commerce. Both of these platforms are more than capable of achieving the important features that Magento 2 can offer whilst enabling you to focus your budget on improving your eCommerce site as opposed to spending your time on maintenance.

Magento popularity data source / Shopify popularity data source

There may still be cases where you need to stick with Magento to maintain certain functionality and upgrading to 2 will be your only option -- this is mainly when it comes to specific integrations, although the list is continually growing for Shopify.