As a freelance Magento developer I still have clients that are running successful businesses on the Magento 1 platform. Magento released an official statement explaining that Magento 1 would no longer be supported by them as of June 2020. The first question that these clients asked me when this happened was “when should we migrate?”.
The answer is pretty simple. You should be looking to migrate from Magento 1 as soon as possible. Magento’s announcement has caused a bit of controversy in the community. This is because it gives Magento 1 store owners a false sense of security. What merchants should be more worried about is when will their hosting company stop their support of PHP v5.6.
PHP v5.6 Support
As of December 2018 PHP stopped supporting v5.6. This means that no more official security patches will be released for this version of PHP and it will no longer be maintained. Normally hosting companies will urge you soon after to upgrade PHP on your server. The Magento 1 platform was developed to be compatible with PHP v5.6 and out of the box is not compatible with PHP v7.0 and above.
Is Magento’s patch the solution to this problem?
Magento have officially announced that it will provide a patch that will make the core application compatible with PHP v7.0. What they haven’t told Magento 1 store owners is that this patch DOES NOT include any 3rd party extensions or code. So if you are using the Magento 1 core application and nothing else, you are fine. Being perfectly honest, I do not know of a single client that is only using the Magento 1 core application without any customisations or extensions.
All of these extensions and customisations would need to be reviewed and made compatible with PHP7. This could mean investing a lot of money into a platform that is soon to become deprecated. Will extension developers make all their extensions compatible with PHP7? Who knows, but it’s definitely not safe to assume that this will be the case. Extension developers main focus will be developing and improving their extensions for Magento 2.
What to do next?
In all seriousness, all Magento 1 store owners should be looking to migrate to either Magento 2 or another ecommerce platform as soon as possible. The migration to Magento 2 is not an easy path and this is putting a lot of people off. Delaying this though is just kicking the can down the road and the longer time goes on the harder it’s going to be.
Which platform is right for you really depends on a number of different factors. This involves deep discussion and careful planning. Being a freelance developer and ecommerce consultant I have a vast amount of experience in migrating Magento 1 websites to other ecommerce platforms. These platforms include both Magento 2 and Shopify.
If you’d like to talk to me about migrating your Magento 1 website then get in touch with me via the form at the bottom of this page.