With over a quarter of a million online shops on the Magento platform it is fair to say that the market has grabbed the functionality and flexibility of Magento 1.x with a great deal of enthusiasm and in many cases worked around any functional constraints ‘without concern’ (albeit with some fancy API and developer budgetary footwork at times).

As always, with any new version release of mission critical software, I always like to challenge the provider’s assumption (that we should immediately migrate) with some very basic, baseline questions-

• Why should I upgrade or migrate at all?
• When should I do it?
• Is it worth the aggro?

Why? The answer to this first question really depends on your current site and it’s bottom line performance and effectiveness. If your site runs smoothly and processes orders without any hiccups, whether on Magento or another commerce platform, you may want to avoid rushing ahead too quickly. However, as most ecommerce sites have grown organically and can often have large numbers of 3rd party extensions, they all tend to build up performance bottlenecks over time which are often overlooked until something crashes – that’s when the customer base starts to become very nervous indeed.

When? If you are using a Magento version that is outdated (anything before 1.8 CE and 1.13 EE) you should really be exploring version 2.0 right now and talking to us about migration plans for your online shop in order to grab the performance enhancements available. If your site is experiencing performance issues, no matter what platform you are on, these discussions are a ‘must have’ to avoid falling behind your competition without a plan to regain the high ground.

As for the pros and cons, the benefits of using Magento are already very well documented – it is a scalable user friendly ecommerce platform that can be customised to match any online business model, which has received a major positive overhaul with the release of version 2.0. With multi language, multi currency and multiple payment gateway support as well as HTML5 capabilities it can offer a superb shopper experience across all devices and is also perfectly associated with Google’s needs and tools to enable tracking and reporting. Last, but not least, Magento is a secure platform with easy to implement SSL security and dedicated IP allowing your customers to safely buy from your site. Finally, the upgrade to Magento 2.0 from earlier versions will increase site speed and make browsing more seamless and provide a future proof route as newer API’s and options open up.

For me, however, the biggest advantage for considering the move to Magento 2.0 or to upgrade to it, is a lot more fundamental. Having grown your ecommerce site organically over time, considering the move will cause you to audit your current approach and performance, create a set of new ideas based upon the very latest features offered by version 2.0, implement the site without tons of legacy code, conflicting API extensions and make a step change in the performance and usability of your site and your ability to efficiently manage and update the site as your customer needs develop.

Whether you are an existing Magento online store owner or not, we believe that Magento 2.0 brings a brilliant new playing field for merchants and their customers alike and the team at Atommedia would love to help you understand the options available to you and your online store – take the first step and give us a call today!