Magento 1.X End of Life. What does that mean for you if you're running Magento?

Magento 1.X is coming to a close this year. It's been a long time coming. But what does that mean for businesses running Magento 1.X? Will it cease to exist after June 30th? Will it be Y2K all over again? The short answer is, no, everything will continue as normal, for a while at least.

So what's actually happening? As of June 2020, Magento will no longer be supporting it's version 1 of Magento Community and Enterprise. There will be no more critical security patches coming from them to keep your version of Magento secure (or as secure as it can be). Obviously, this has some fairly serious implications for any business running Magento, and it's certainly our recommendation and Magento's that your infrastructure stays up to date to prevent any malware or malicious attacks, but the reality is, the site will continue to operate, and as long as you've taken all the necessary precautions already, you've realistically got until the end of 2020 to get it sorted. 

But, why wait? Magento 1 is coming to an end, and Magento 2 is still much the same. You still need to continually update your infrastructure with patches, you still need to host and support your architecture and you still need to spend your precious time thinking about if the site will hold up with your next phase of growth, instead of actually planning what's going to create that growth.  Magento was Pocket Square's bread and butter and we loved it. It gave us the capability to do everything we, and our clients wanted and more. But over the years, Shopify and Shopify Plus have gotten better and better, taking care of the core technical requirements necessary to support a growing business and leaving us with the fun stuff, the stuff that actually makes a difference for your customers. 

So instead of jumping straight in to Magento 2, thinking it's going to solve the problems you had with Magento 1, think about where you want to spend your time. Worrying about the bill from your agency for your monthly support or working closely with your agency and internal team on growing the business.