As most owners of Magento 1 (M1)  sites will surely know by now, technical support for the product will stop at the end of June this year. 

The implications of this are significant - if your business operates a M1 site then you need to replace it as soon as you can. 

Why? Because although your M1 site will continue to work after the deadline, doing so comes at a high financial risk to your business. 

The Financial Risk of Operating a Magento 1 Site After the End of June

After the end of June 2020, Magento will no longer be providing security patches for its M1 product - this puts your business at enormous risk because of GDPR.

The GDPR requires a business to take steps to ensure personal data is kept safely and in a secure way. After the end of June, data contained in Magento databases is unlikely to be viewed as secure because the owners of the technology will no longer be providing security patches in the event of vulnerabilities being discovered. Site operators will instead have to rely on members of the community to keep the technology secure. 

Conceptually this may work, but in the event of a data breach the courts are unlikely to look favourably on a business that took the decision not to formally ensure the security of any personal data it held. The fines payable under GDPR could be up to €10 million or 2% of the businesses global turnover - whichever is higher.  On top of this, a business can also expect civil claims for damages resulting from the breach, which could result in even more cost. 

Your organisation’s data controller certainly shouldn’t be happy if you’re still using M1 after the end of June.

This security issue is increased even further by the end of life notice that has been issued for PHP7.2 (an underlying M1 dependency) that is due to happen in November 2020. If a business hasn’t migrated away from M1 by then it really won’t have a leg to stand on. 

As the financial risk is extreme, a business really should be looking to move away from M1 as soon as it possibly can. On top of this, if you take card payments on your M1 site rather than through a third-party service, then it’s likely that your website will be put onto a PCI blacklist, preventing you from taking any payments from customers.

It all piles up to say that if you want to continue operating as an e-commerce business then you must upgrade your site as a priority. 

Think of it like this:  everyone understands that you shouldn’t drive a car without an MOT because it might be dangerous. In the same way, operating a M1 site after the end of June is dangerous and shouldn’t be done.

10 Reasons You Should Upgrade to Magento 2

Hopefully by now you’ve determined that it’s time to move on from M1. Wondering where to go next? Worry not - the latest version of Magento, Magento 2 (M2), is the perfect solution for your upgrade.

Here are our top 10 reasons for moving to M2.

1. Magento remains more cost-effective for established retailers (those with turnover in excess of £1m) than other major platforms. (See our article comparing the costs of Magento versus Shopify)

2. There are well-defined migration paths that ensure moving a business’s customer, account and product data to the new site is relatively stress-free

3. The back-end of the system has been redesigned slightly to make the site easier to use. However, it is still similar enough that users’ processes and systems that businesses have developed will be easily adapted - reducing the cost of adoption

4. The M2 platform will deliver much faster load speeds, which has a positive impact on customer experience and should deliver improved conversion rates and SEO (check out our article about Google’s page speed badges)

5. Magento has many established integrations with the major providers of services for e-commerce business. This means that a business can quickly take advantage of new business development and cost-saving opportunities

6. The checkout experience has been dramatically improved - its new streamlined market-leading approach should improve conversion rates

7. The platform has been designed with mobile experience at its heart - it enables flexibility in design to optimise for whatever device your customers use when making a purchase

8. The search platform built into Magento has been re-worked to deliver much-improved results, improving your customers’ shopping experience with the aim of increasing conversion rates

9. The redesign of the core platform architecture means that the increased speed benefits are not limited to what customers experience. The back-end speed of the system has also been increased dramatically so that updates and changes can be implemented much more quickly

10. There’s comfort in being with the market leader. Amongst established e-commerce businesses Magento remains the most popular platform. This means that your customer is likely to be familiar with the feel of Magento having used the platform on other sites. This gives the user confidence and security that delivers improved conversion rates

Help When It’s Needed

If you’d like to talk to someone about migrating your business we’d love to hear from you.

Please get in touch on 0161 402 3170 or by using the form below.

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