Saying Goodbye To My Old Car And Upgrading To Magento 2

Last week I said goodbye to my old car. It wasn’t easy. I had that car for many years, it took me many great places. It’s the car I drove to Niagara falls with, it was the car I drove my daughter back from the hospital with when she was born and it was the car that took me to work every day. I really loved that car, but in the past few months, it was in the shop more than it was in my driveway, the price it costed to maintain finally overcame its value, and I had to bite the bullet, I bought a new car.

The nice part is, my new car is a 2017. It has features I couldn’t dream about with my old car, and it runs a whole lot smoother. I’m looking forward to all the awesome things I know it has in store for me.

With Magento 1 being phased out, I find myself telling Magento 1 users that they are in a similar scenario. By the end of next summer Magento will no longer offer support, and there are no extensions being made for Magento 1 anymore. I know it’s hard to accept, I kept on to my car longer than I should have. But after a while, maintaining my car just wasn’t possible anymore. Magento 1 is no different, with no support or extensions, you will be facing loss of PCI compliance, security breaches, an out of date Extension Market and your site being harder to maintain. Maintaining it will no longer be a worthwhile investment, it’s like throwing money at an old car.

The good news is I really like my new car, and Magento 2 is just that. Magento 2 has a lower cost to develop and maintain because it is easier to manage Theming and Design (front-end), it has a vetted Marketplace which means less bugs and conflicts and also reduces custom integration costs. Additionally, it performs better in many areas which helps increase online revenues such as a heavy feature set for B2B, a powerful responsive design and SEO features  and an optimized checkout process which reduces cart abandonment. My new car runs smoother and so does Magento 2. Another thing I really like about my new car is how fast it can go, but website speed is far more important. Magento 2 will  improve your site performance with built in Full Page Caching and  Visual and Dynamic Catalog Management to improve cross sells.

Lower cost to maintain and increased revenue is a combination you can handle.

Saying goodbye to my car wasn’t easy, but the increased features and efficiency of my new car really makes it worthwhile. I find it hard to tell people that their site is a ticking time bomb, but I know that once they are on Magento 2 they will love it!