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Should I move to Magento 2?

By 5 March 2016No Comments

We are getting asked a lot about whether you should go with Magento version 2 or 1. So, I am going to give you my honest opinion as to where my head is at with this right now. Before I do, I want you to know that even though I am the Managing Director of a London based Magento Agency, people will tell you that integrity is our no. 1 mantra, so this is not biased.

So, there are some of you in the position of wondering if you should upgrade and then there are others of you about to embark on a new website.

Here is the first thing to consider no matter what you are doing. Magento will continue to support Enterprise v1 until November 2018. This means they will not be developing new features for v1, but will keep releasing security patches and other maintenance patches. Obviously this will mean that Community will take the same route.

Should I upgrade now?

For those who are wondering if they should upgrade now, don’t bother yet! Magento are saying that 90% of the Magento extensions are now compatible, but they will be talking the ones that a) they have approved (these are of course the only ones you should be using) and b) are for Magento Enterprise. There are some great improvements with v2, but I would say that if you already have budget allocated to growing your website this year, keep doing that instead. However, what I would do is pay for an agency to give you their assessment of your site and therefore provide you with a cost. The only reason why you may want to upgrade now will be if you have a major development change you are about to go through. If I was you, I would be looking to plan my upgrade next year.

New magento website, should I use Magento 2?

You should absolutely be considering Magento 2 and if you are looking to use Enterprise, then you are going to have very little choice but to use Magento 2. Magento are saying that they will only sell Magento 2 licenses now, but if you are lucky, you may still be able to get a Magento Enterprise v1.14 license. For those choosing to use the Community Edition, you have more flexibility on this, as you can still download v1.9 and we expect you will be able to for some time. If you are going for the Community Edition, then the best way to make this decision is to make sure your agency has investigated all the extensions and integrations you need will work with Magento 2, if so, then you should go for Magento 2. If not, then you need to consider how important those things are to the success of your website. Listen, at the end of the day you have nearly 3 years before Magento will stop supporting v1 and by that time, you should probably be doing a website refresh and it is at that point you should consider upgrading to Magento 2.

In both of the cases above, and I bang on about this in some of my posts, please please please make sure you choose a Magento Agency that knows what they doing and therefore have plenty of Magento websites they can show you to support this! I get so many calls from people that have had a hard time getting their site complete by an agency that had maybe only completed a handful of Magento sites.

Hey, and no obligation, but if you are unsure about which version, then please give me a call and I will give you my opinion.

Thank you for reading.

Rebecca Jones

Managing Director of objectsource

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