What will happen to your site after June 31, 2020, when Magento 1 is put to rest?
Will my site explode?
Will my database melt down?
Will my customers get all their orders for free?
Not quite.
But it will get ugly.
How ugly? Not as ugly as the ugliest animal in the world (the blobfish, if you were wondering), but pretty ugly.
Let’s take a look at 5 things that will happen after Magento 1 End of Life.
Questions about migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2? Check out our complete non-developer’s guide to migration.
1. Quality Fixes and Security Patches Will Stop
Security patches, bug fixes, updates and support for both Magento 1.x Commerce (Enterprise Edition) and Magento 1.x Open Source (Community Edition) will be provided through June 30, 2020.
After that…you’re on your own.
While it’s unlikely your Magento 1 storefront will completely crash as soon as Magento 1 End of Life hits, you will you’ll stop receiving support or patches of any kind from Magento.
But wait! There’s more!
You won’t be able to report bugs and get fixes, or patch your system. That means, if you’re not on Magento 2 by June 30, 2020, your site will turn into a sitting duck for hackers and credit card skimmers. Plus, your website’s performance and security will degrade over time. The longer you wait to upgrade, the worse these problems will get.
Think of your site as a skydiver jumping out of an airplane at 20,000 feet with no parachute. If you catch him seconds after he jumps, all is good.
If you wait just 10 seconds, he’ll be traveling 120 mph. You can still catch him, but it’ll be more painful. For you and him.
If you wait till the last moment, he might hit the ground head-on. And then you’ll have a lawsuit on your hands.
In other words, start early.
2. Extension Developers Will Stop Support (They Probably Already Have)
If you’re running multiple Magento 1 extensions, there’s a good chance you’ve already noticed a big decrease in support for your extensions. Developers have already (mostly) moved on from developing and supporting Magento 1 extensions to Magento 2 extensions.
Because the market for Magento 1 extensions is so much smaller than Magento 2 – and decreasing every day – you’re going to have a harder time getting support for your extensions.
By the time June 2020 rolls around, the vast majority of Magento 1 extension developers will have moved on, and won’t be actively supporting their extensions for Magento 1 anymore. Since the platform is deprecated, it won’t make business sense to keep supporting these extensions – it’s more profitable to build new extensions for the Magento 2 platform.
3. It Will Become More Expensive to Hire Developers to Work on Your Magento 1 Site
If you’re an experienced developer with great technical skills, you may already be handling updates and patching for your Magento 1 website.
If so, great! You can probably keep your website going for a bit longer after End of Life (though your skills would probably be better put to use migrating to Magento 2).
But if you don’t handle technical details on your own, and prefer to hire developers, you’re going to start paying more to developers.
A lot more.
Supporting a deprecated platform is a giant pain, and most qualified Magento developers have already moved on to Magento 2.
That means you’ll have a smaller pool of developers to choose from, and the ones that you do find will be more pricey, compared to devs working on the Magento 2 platform.
4. Your Business Might Lose its PCI Compliance (Or Customer Credit Card Data)
Naturally, this depends on how your business handles payments. If, for example, you use a third-party payment gateway (which you should be doing) you don’t have a high risk of losing your PCI compliance.
However, part of PCI compliance does involve securing and protecting the platform upon which your website is built. To be on the safe side, it’s best to use a platform that has not reached its end of its life cycle – like Magento 2.
In addition, when Magento 1 stops releasing security patches and support, we’re sure many previously-unknown weaknesses and flaws will be exploited by hackers.
If you continue to use an unsecured platform like Magento 1 after June 2020, you’re opening yourself up to some huge liabilities. If customer data is stolen from your website, you may have to pay steep fines.
The average cost of a data breach across all companies in 2019 is $242 per stolen record.
That’s a hefty price to pay for sticking with Magento 1.
5. Your Website Will Get Slower, Buggier and Provide a Worse Overall User Experience
We’re not trashing your Magento 1 website. We’re sure it’s great!
But without regular patching for bugs, performance upgrades, and other such things, it’s going to get worse. That’s just a fact.
There are a limited number of optimizations you can make to improve your website using Magento 1. In comparison, Magento 2 comes loaded with features and functionality out-of-the-box.
This, combined with its upcoming end of life, means that your website is going to be slow, buggy, and more prone to errors and other issues which lead to a poor user experience.
And we all know what that leads to – fewer sales. Things like usability, loading times and a smooth shopping process are absolutely critical for your continued profitability. And as Magento 1 continues to deprecate after June 2020, you’ll probably start noticing a decline in sales.
Don’t Let Magento 1 End Of Life Affect Your Business – Start The Migration Process ASAP
As you can see, there are quite a few different things that will happen to your business and website if you continue using Magento 1 after its EOL in June 2020 – and none of them are good.
So, what should you do? Migrate to Magento 2. It’s a giant huge improvement over Magento 1 in every way – and your business deserves to use the best eCommerce platform.
We know that migrating your Magento storefront may seem intimidating. That’s why 121eCommerce is here to help. We specialize in Magento 2 migrations for eCommerce businesses of all sizes.
Don’t wait.
Make sure your Magento 1 website is safely migrated to the Magento 2 platform much before June 30, 2020.
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