Magento 2 has been around for four years now. In that time, it has proven a reliable piece of software, and it has helped thousands of merchants to improve their profit margins.

Despite the power of Magento 2, however, Magento 1 is still alive. In fact, Magento 1 still powers over 130,000 websites. That means that, if you’re a Magento user, there’s a reasonable chance you’re still running an outdated version of Magento.

If that’s the case, this article is for you. Here’s why you should consider transferring to Magento 2 soon.

For one, Magento 2 offers better performance. Everybody knows website speed is a considerable concern with Magento. Luckily, Magento 2 creates web pages that are often twice as fast as those made with Magento 1. That’s why anybody who’s having performance issues with their Magento 1 store should consider replatforming.

Of course, this isn’t the only benefit. Magento 2 is also more secure, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, etc. It practically has at least a minor advantage in any area you can imagine.

Still, you might say this doesn’t concern you. You might be perfectly happy with every aspect of Magento 1. You could even say that replatforming is more like a site migration than a software upgrade and that it would just cost you money.

We will not argue with this. If your Magento 1 store is working out for you, that’s good news.

That being said, you will probably have to transfer to Magento 2 anyway.

Here’s why:

The issue is that the team behind Magento wants to focus all its efforts on Magento 2. This means no more support and no more security patches for Magento 1.

You will have to take care of any newfound security exploits on your own. This is very costly—way more costly than migrating to Magento 2. Even then, your store probably wouldn’t be as secure as it was when you had proper updates.

Moreover:

The extensions won’t get further updates, and there won’t be new extensions for Magento 1. You’d have to get somebody to custom-code any function you want to add to your store. Again, this would be very costly.

All in all, you’ll have to migrate your store eventually. The process might be painful, but running a Magento website without support is even worse.

The good news is:

You still have time. Magento 1 will keep getting updates until at least June 2020. You should plan to make the transfer to Magento 2 by then. While you still have to replatform, you should have enough breathing room to plan everything out.

At the end of the day, no Magento merchant will be able to avoid making this migration. Once you make it, however, you’re practically guaranteed to have a much faster and better store.

And if you’d like to know more about Magento and see some stats about the differences between Magento 1 and 2, check out the infographic below.