Magento 1: End of life

Magento 1’s expected end of life is fast approaching. Many, many merchants are still up and running on the system need to think about what steps they are going to take to prepare and ensure a smooth transition to their next platform.

As of now Magento will cease to support version 1 at the end of June 2020.

Long time store owners will have noticed that there hasn’t really been any major features added to Magento 1 since 2014. Since then the priority at Magento HQ has been the Magento 2 framework. It makes sense that Magento isn’t looking to support both platforms at the same time, they’ve already pushed the original end-of-life date by 18 months so there isn’t likely to be another date set.

Upgrade to Magento 2

The best way to ensure you are up-to-date security and feature wise is to make the switch to Magento 2.

Before making the jump take some time to consider the way you actually use Magento and if the requirements you had for Magento 1 are reflected in how your store is currently running. There may also be better extensions/integrations available now that weren’t when you first launched your store.

Magento 1 had a life-cycle of about 14 years, so now is the time to upgrade to get the most out of your Magento 2 store.

Continuing Support of Magento 1

Some module developers too have been open about continuing to support their Magento 1 modules for as long as merchants are still using their plug-ins. The guys at OnceStepCheckout for example will continue to support their 20,000+ Magento 1 customers.

Magento LTS (long term support) is a fork of the official Magento Community edition that aims to integrate improvements from the community while still maintaining a high level of comparability to the official releases.

Magento 1 will only go on so long, think Windows XP before a security issue forces the hands of those using it to move away. While Magento has always had a reactive approach to vulnerabilities fixing them before they are made public this isn’t the case when a project is purely maintained by a community.

What are merchants doing?

In a OneStepCheckout survey 29% of the 125 respondents said they were sticking with Magento 1 and a further 45% said they were planning to migrate to Magento 2, just not yet.

According to Builtwith.com there are still as many Magento 1 stores (55,362) sites active today as Magento 2 (51306).

Upgrade or not?

You’re better upgrading as soon as possible, not least because you’ll get the most out of Magento 2 the longer you are on it.

Just don’t worry about Magento 3, yet.