What will Magento 1 end of life mean for you?
The popular e-commerce system Magento 1 reached the end of manufacturer support in June 2020. The successor Magento 2 has been available for years, but thousands of shops are still running on version 1. Is yours? Don’t panic, we will help you!
A brief history about Magento
The Magento shop system was established in 2008 in its version 1 release. In 2017, the system switched from the Challengers to the Leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, where Magento still resides in its current version 2. Magento now belongs to Adobe and competes against systems such as Oracle, Salesforce or SAP Hybris. Magento is still in the license-free version Magento Open Source (formerly: Community Edition) and in the licensed version Magento Commerce(formerly Enterprise Edition) available. This means that Magento can be used from small/medium-sized shops to huge enterprise systems. Version 2 of Magento shifted the range of uses a bit towards medium / large shops. Magento 2 is also a completely new system technologically. So now that an update from Magento 1 to Magento 2 corresponds to a complete relaunch. We will advise you in detail on the options for continuing to operate it, switching to Magento 2, or an alternative shop system.
What does “End of Life” (EOL) mean?
With the “End of Life,” a software reaches the end of the manufacturer’s support. In our case, no more security updates will appear for Magento 1 from this point on. From this point on, the manufacturer only publishes updates for Magento 2. Important to know: Software does not stop working with the “End of Life”. One is only responsible for that point to take precautions against possible hacker attacks. Legal due diligence obliges data protection. The further the end-of-life is exceeded, the more efforts are necessary to secure it. In the next chapters, you will find possible alternative courses of action.
I want to continue running Magento 1
Our recommendation: plan the change soon anyway
Switching to Magento 2 or an alternative shop system means a significant investment of time and money. It is understandable that many shop operators are considering continuing to run Magento 1. Especially if the existing webshop works well or a switch would not be commercially viable. Basically, Magento 1 can continue to operate for a while to become. You are now responsible for securing the system in terms of security. So if a vulnerability were discovered, you’d have to act. Otherwise, your shop and your customers’ data would be unprotected. This protection will become increasingly difficult to guarantee overtime. There is always the risk that your payment service provider will cease operations, that extension manufacturers will no longer offer updates or that dangerous hacks will emerge. Larger e-commerce projects take months or longer to implement. We, therefore, recommend switching within a year or max. To be planned for 2 years after the end of life. What variants are there until then for the continued operation of Magento 1?
Magento 1 support “Do it yourself”
Continue to operate Magento 1
At the end of manufacturer support to keep your system itself up to date. For this, you or your web agency need a lot of know-how and some capacities for monitoring and development. You were already responsible for the webserver level and for the extensions and code components you wrote yourself. But now the entire Magento core, i.e. the complete Magento software with many thousands of lines of program code, is added. This variant requires a lot of effort. Especially if your webshop does not run exclusively in an intranet and is accessible from outside on the web, we recommend one of the following variants.
Magento 1 Support Mage-one.com (with costs)
Magento 1 continues to operate with unofficial updates
Mage-one.com is a company that has committed itself to support for Magento 1 beyond the end-of-life and also assumes liability. As a deadline extension until you switch to Magento 2 or an alternative system. Experienced German Magento freelancers stand behind the company and let them actively search for security gaps and publish security updates that can be imported by your agency or your developers. The support is chargeable and can be billed annually or monthly with a 10% surcharge. The costs are based on the shop turnover (see Mage-One price list). According to his own statement, the support could be maintained for 5 years, but this is not guaranteed. The support package is available for the license-free Magento 1 Community Edition. If you operate an Enterprise Edition, which is subject to a license, you can still book the package, as the Enterprise Edition contains the complete code of the Community Edition. However , you would have to take care of securing the pure enterprise modules yourself.
Magento 1 continues to operate with unofficial updates
In this license-free variant, an association of developers with Magento LTS provides a long-term support version of Magento 1. The participation of the developer community is welcome. In the OpenMage project on Github , unofficial bug fixes, security updates and performance improvements are published backwards compatible. At least for the Magento core, possibly also for some extensions in the future. In contrast to the paid version of Mage-One, there is no incentive search for security gaps.
Would you like to get more information why you need to switch from Magento 1 to Magento 2 please read this article Magento 1 End of Life to get in-depth information.
