Magento 1 reached end-of-life on 30 June 2020. If you’re still on it, you’re running an unsupported, unpatched ecommerce platform — and your PCI compliance is on increasingly thin ice. Worse, every month you delay, the migration gets a little bit harder: extensions get abandoned, hosting gets harder to find, and the developer pool that knows M1 shrinks.
The good news: migrating to Magento 2 isn’t the nightmare some agencies make it sound. We’ve done it dozens of times. Here’s what to expect.
Why migrate now
- Security. No more official security patches. Every CVE that drops is a potential incident waiting to happen.
- PCI compliance. If you take card payments (and you do), running unsupported software is a fast track to failing your next assessment.
- Performance. Magento 2 — properly built, especially on Hyvä — is dramatically faster than M1. Faster stores convert better.
- Modern tooling. Magento 2 supports Composer, REST and GraphQL APIs, modern Elasticsearch, PHP 8 — everything M1 doesn’t.
- Extension ecosystem. The marketplace for M1 extensions is essentially frozen. The M2 ecosystem is alive and well.
The migration playbook
Stage 1 — audit. We map every page type, every URL pattern, every extension, every integration. We list what migrates as-is, what gets rebuilt, what gets retired.
Stage 2 — staging build. Magento 2 environment provisioned. Catalogue and customer data migrated in cycles. Theme rebuilt (we strongly recommend the Hyvä frontend for new builds; it’s an order of magnitude faster than the default Luma theme). Integrations wired up.
Stage 3 — UAT. You and your team poke around the staging store. Place test orders, run reports, check the back-office screens you live in. We fix what needs fixing.
Stage 4 — launch night. Final data sync. DNS cuts over. We watch the dashboards for 72 hours. Most of our M1→M2 launches are uneventful, and that’s the point.
Stage 5 — post-launch. 30 days of included support, then onto an ongoing Magento support plan if you want it.