Why It’s Time To Move To WordPress
In the last quarter of 2018, Magento shed some light on the company’s plans to bring about the end of Magento 1, an older version of the Magento content management system.
As a lot of Magento 1 customers now have to transition to a newer version of this CMS before June 2020 or move their website to another platform entirely, it would prove beneficial knowing exactly what option would suit your business best.
Following this announcement, we will now explore why this new development requires you to migrate your website and how you can minimize the chances of having to go through with a website migration in the future.
Magento 1 Version History
Magento is the brainchild of Roy Rubin, CEO of Varien, and is known as an open source e-commerce platform that helps merchants sell and buy various products. Development started on Magento in 2007 and resulted in the first official version being released in 2010, Enterprise Edition 1.9.
Since then development has been ongoing, resulting in various patches with minor and major releases integrated throughout different developmental stages. Since July 2010, Enterprise Edition 1.9 has been developed up to version 1.14, with the last minor release in June 2014. However, in late 2015 a major upgrade was announced with the release of Enterprise Edition 2.0.
In September 2017, Enterprise Edition was renamed Magento Commerce and has continued to evolve up to Magento Commerce version 2.3. The latest release was made available in November 2018.
With no sign of slowing down expanding this platform, Magento has deemed it fit to offer the necessary security and software support to individuals that still need to upgrade to the latest version. However, each available version of this CMS has an expiry date when it comes to cashing in on that support.
End Of Life Repercussions
Seeing as development is currently building on the Magento Commerce 2.0 version, the end of life for Magento 1 is scheduled for June 2020. After this date, there will be no more additional support offered in terms of quality patches or security updates. Depending on the version of Magento 1 you have, offered support may differ.
For Enterprise Edition version 1.9 through to version 1.12, security patches will still be on offer up to June 2020. It is also important to note that from Magento 2.2 and onwards, the CMS’s name has changed from Enterprise Edition to Magento Commerce. Additionally, Magento Commerce version 2.2 has extended its offered support up until December 2019 to line up with the End of Support date for PHP 7.1.
Any temporary support or security patches only apply to the original Magento software and will not be able to cover any third-party extensions. This means that if you have modified or customized your CMS by non-traditional means, you will have to maintain those modifications until you manage to migrate your website.
The Future Of Magento
Seeing as the maintenance of Magento 1 will soon come to an end, the platform can become vulnerable to security threats, faulty coding, and a general lack of expert support. This means that upgrading to a newer version of Magento or migrating to another CMS is really the most logical thing to do.
Magento has made it clear that for Magento Commerce 2.3 and any subsequent releases, support will include the following:
- Fixes for minor releases up to 12 months or longer after the announcement of the next minor release has been made known.
- Security fixes for minor releases up to 18 months or longer after the announcement of the next minor release have been made known.
- Patch releases for the current supported minor releases to ensure platform security.
Although progressive platform improvement shows a commitment towards innovation, migrating your website data to keep up with Magento might become a continual requirement. Seeing how much resources get wasted every time you have to come up with a data migration plan, there must surely be a better alternative.
Why Migrate To WordPress?
When choosing WordPress as your CMS, you are choosing a stable and customer-orientated platform that values CMS evolution, but not at the expense of the end user.
When installing WordPress for the first time, you automatically get the latest version installed. After that, you will then need to make sure you update your CMS regularly through your user-friendly dashboard to maintain the latest version of this software.
WordPress has never created a new platform version that requires you to perform a manual migration in order to continue using it, and also endeavors to never do this. Therefore, choosing Wordpress as your content management system might ultimately save you a lot of time and resources when it comes to evolving your website alongside your CMS.
If you need a trained eye to manage your website’s CMS migration from Magento to Woocommerce , call WordHerd @ 602-402-9035 or request a free evaluation.