Why You Should Migrate to Magento 2

Are you confused to decide whether you should Migrate to Magento 2 or should continue using 1.x versions? This question was beating minds of every individual since the Magento 2 launch was announced. You also might be wondering why I have used word migration rather upgrade. Actually Magento 2 has come up with complete makeover and it’s a bit different than upgrading Magento 1.x versions.

As per Builtwith surveys and statistics, Magento is holding 13% of market shares and after release of Magento 2, this number is growing at a rate of knots, sounds pretty well!! According to Magento experts, these number will skyrocket by next year as many of Magento 1.x will start switching to Magento 2 and some of the new brands will definitely migrate or develop their stores to leverage the features and functionality served by Magento 2.

What Magento 1 is lacking?

Magento’s flexibility to use extensions and run a store made it most popular in Ecommerce world. But only flexibility can’t help as there are numerous features was still lacking such as responsiveness, performance optimization, admin capabilities, UI, slow speed and many more. These problems encouraged team to develop upgraded platform – Magento 2.

What’s new in Magento 2?

• • Streamlined folder structure

The most obvious and visible difference one can spot is streamlined folder structure. Media, cron, error, index, skin all are moved to a static folder. It makes it easier to manage static content with CDN. In short, this new structure make more sense, well organized which helps developers with smoother customization.

• • Performance Optimization

According to experts, Magento 2 will load 20% faster than earlier Magento 1.x versions. This faster site load helps getting more conversions and improves SEO. Full page caching for all CMS pages helps boosting performance as Magento doesn’t need to fire queries to show pages to users. This helps catalog pages to be handled in a better way.

• • User friendly checkout

The checkout process in Magento 2 is easier for customers to checkout and place order as customers need to fill less information. This reduces abandoned carts and improve conversions.

• • Top notch extensions

Magento has implement strict policies to submit extensions to the marketplace. They need to pass through various quality checks and test cases which makes better chances of improved store performance and customization.

• • Easy admin interface

The new designed admin interface is more user friendly and easy to learn for newbies. It reduces time consumption to manage orders, categories, products and pages. You need lesser knowledge to modify store appearance still built a highly functional store in half a time.

• • Mobile responsive layouts

People now a days are using more mobile and tablets for online shopping. This was the core focus for Magento 2 team while developing this new platform. Magento 2 thus has responsive design, integrated video, streamlined checkout all to improve user experience even on tablets and smart phones.

• • Optimized code quality

Advanced quality codes has been used while designing Magento 2 which helps developers to produce their own code with best practices. A lot of documentations are available on various topics which will lead to easy to maintain and upgradable code.

Why you should migrate to Magento 2?

The most important reason you should switch to Magento 2 is Magento 1.x will stop getting any support by the end of 2018. So it would be tough to be on this platform where you will not have any guidance on issues if problem occurs. In such case, Magento 2 migration is the only option.

Another reason you may have noticed is after the Magento 2 launch, Magento 1 has stopped providing new features in upgrades and only providing security upgrades through patches. No more features, only safety is focused.

Magento 2 has become core focus even for the Magento team so everything from feature upgrades to performance optimization will revolve around Magento 2. So better you set out to be on this new platform as soon as possible.

I would recommend, if you are planning to startup a new business, obviously it would be better to go with the all new Magento 2 rather going for M1 and jump to the M2 after few years.

What are the pain points for Upgrading to Magento 2?

If you are thinking to upgrade from Magento 1 to Magento 2 for your existing site, decision is a bit tricky and challenging. Even though Magento 2 includes data migration tools to upgrade existing stores, customization, extensions, themes need to be rewritten. It would be messy and troublesome if your store has complex customization.

Unless you are experienced developer, don’t tryout yourself as you may lose crucial data which probably ruin your business.

Make the right decision!

Planning to migrate to Magento 2 or a completely new Magento store? Make a right decision by choosing experience tech-masters of Magento to perform upgrade or migration. Our expertise will lead to potential problem identification and analysis, using best practices to solve them, providing best return on your investment which fits under your pocket.