Today, Magento 2 is one of the most powerful, highly-customizable, and scalable eCommerce platforms in the market.
However, only 5% of all 250,000+ Magento websites are using the latest Magento 2 platform.
But, since Magento has finally ended the support for Magento 1 websites and stopped releasing new updates, security patches, and extension updates, lots of Magento 1 websites are now migrating to Magento 2 platform.
And if you also have a Magento 1 website, it has now become necessary to migrate it to Magento 2 platform.
In this article, we’ve shared all the pros and cons of Magento 2 Migration so that you can know how migrating to Magento 2 platform will impact your eCommerce business.
Magento 2 Migration Pros
Magento 2 has so many benefits that if we list everything in this article, it would become ten times the size. Therefore, below we’ve listed only the most important benefits that actually have the biggest impact on eCommerce business migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 platform.
1 - Modern Technology Stack
Magento 2 platform is quite different from the Magento 1 platform. Unlike Magento 1 that uses PHP 5 version, the Magento 2 platform utilizes PHP 7 version along with the latest bundle of software which includes HTML 5, CSS 3, JQuery, Symfony, PSR-0 to 4 Coding Standards, Composer, Apache, MySQL, Twig, Nginx, and Gulp.
This entire technology stack ultimately takes the performance of Magento 2 based websites to the top level.
2 - Extremely Scalable
The scalability of Magento 2 is simply unmatched. Thanks to its flexible and robust features, Magento 2 platform can scale your business like no other eCommerce platform can.
In addition, Magento 2 is also capable to easily handle enterprise-level traffic for rapidly growing eCommerce businesses.
3 - Mobile Optimized
Nowadays, it is crucial to develop mobile-first websites if you want to rank in top positions on the search engine results page.
Thankfully, Magento 2 platform was designed for mobile from the ground up. What this means is that Magento 2 based websites can easily provide quality mobile experience, which can ultimately boost your conversion rate.
4 - Powerful SEO
Unlike Magento 1, the Magento 2 platform comes with a complete suite of SEO features that gives the full control over which links are to be passed to Google.
Besides this, Magento 2 is also equipped with discoverability tools such as XML/HTML sitemaps.
And for advanced SEO, Magento 2 platform also provides you with prefixes, suffixes, canonical tags, and so on.
All in all, Magento 2 platform makes it a lot easier for new eCommerce merchants to get found on the internet quickly.
5 - Payment Gateway
All the popular Payment Gateways like Braintree, Authorize.net, Paypal are now internal parts of Magento 2. This means, you don’t need to purchase and integrate third-party extensions for any of these payment gateways.
6 - Developer-Friendly
Magento 2 not only utilizes the modern technology stack but it was also built according to the modern development logic. And this makes Magento 2 platform highly efficient for Magento 2 developers to develop, maintain, and upgrade Magento based websites.
And the best part is, modern development logic also cuts down lots of development as well as maintenance costs while increasing the delivery timeline.
7 - Quality Extensions
In Magento 2 marketplace, the quality of all third-party Magento 2 extensions is thoroughly checked and monitored. This basically helps to make sure optimum quality & security of Magento 2 extensions.
Apart from this, since a lot of Magento 1 stores are being migrated to Magento 2 platform, there are now thousands of approved Magento 2 extensions available on the Magento Marketplace.
Also read: Why Upgrade to Magento 2 and Not Stay on Magento 1?
Magento 2 Migration Cons
Magento 2 is an extremely powerful platform as you just saw above. But, there are also a couple of Magento 2 cons that we strongly believe you should be aware of.
Here are the main Magento 2 cons that you should know about.
1 - Themes Can’t be Ported
Whether you’ve purchased a theme template or custom-designed it on your Magento 1 store, you cannot port it to Magento 2 platform during migration process.
But on the bright side, redesigning your store theme from the ground-up will also be a strong move for your eCommerce brand.
2 - Price
Although Magento Community Edition is open-source and completely free to use, the Magento 2 Enterprise Edition does carry a price tag. But if you’re a small eCommerce business owner, you’re not going to require the Magento 2 Enterprise Edition for a few years as the Magento 2 Community Edition is powerful enough to handle small as well as medium-sized eCommerce business operations.
3 - Incompatible Extensions
If you’ve integrated third-party Magento 1 extensions in your existing store, then unfortunately not all of them will work on Magento 2.
However, since Magento 2 extensions marketplace is growing at a rapid pace, you can easily find the best alternatives for your outdated Magento 1 extensions.
4 - Intensive Migration
Although Magento 1 to Magento 2 Migration process is quite straightforward. But migrating your data to Magento 2 database will require technical expertise and some effort.
So, if you’re planning to upgrade your Magento 1 store to Magento 2, we highly recommend hiring outside help to make the migration process as smooth as possible.
MageDelight, for example, provides highly efficient Magento 2 Migration Service with guaranteed zero downtime of your existing store.
Is Magento 2 Right for Your Business?
Magento 2’s unbeatable flexibility & scalability, improved site performance, and customization features for omnichannel strategies are unmatched.
And it has been already proven that Magento 2 can most certainly deliver extraordinary results for eCommerce businesses of any size when implemented correctly.
So, whether you’re launching a new eCommerce store or want to migrate your existing store, Magento 2 is definitely a clear choice if you want to grow your business.
We have, in fact, worked with Magento platform for more than 8 years now and we’re already helping our existing as well as new clients smoothly upgrade their stores with our prominent Magento 2 Migration Solutions.
