More Reasons to Migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2

Isaiah Bollinger

Earlier this year we wrote a post on Magento 2 improvements compared to Magento 1. We created a simpler post so you can quickly scan some of the major improvements to Magento 2 broken down in several high-level categories.

Better Performance:

Magento 2 is overall more performant than Magento 1 when production mode is on leading to faster page load times and ability to scale to handle more traffic and SKU counts. This should also reduce table locking and performance issues associated with Magento 1.x.
Built-in Redis and Varnish caching support, which is huge (adding in just these two things into an M2 install can immediately increase performance by 4-10x)
Indexing is now more performant database-wise and M2 CE includes some indexing features that were only available in 1.x in the EE line
General improvements to the database structure and somewhat reduced query complexity
Reduced JS calls to improve page load times
Compatible with PHP7, which is about 20% faster in some cases compared to Magento 1’s PHP 5.6

Better Frontend Capabilities:

New Magento UI library makes it a bit easier to develop new custom front-end pages and widgets
Additional widgets include product widgets to make it easier to add featured products and elements to pages
Additional HTML5, CCS3, RequireJS to make development more modern
CSS pre-processing via LESS
Blank theme included – if you would rather start from scratch instead of Luma
Improved base Luma theme
Improved ease of use two step checkout out of the box
Minicart out of the box
Almost all Prototype has been removed in favor of jQuery
Easier quick order functionality for B2B eCommerce users

Better Admin Functionality:

More modern interface
Touch-accessible
Grids are customizable, can be saved as different views. This is extremely helpful for admins that want to use the admin
A section for integrations so you can add new integrations via the admin
New multi-shipping settings for shipping to multiple addresses
Magento Enterprise has many more features built-in such as RMA functionality built-in, and continues to improve faster with every version release

Better Development Capabilities:

They is a composer dependency system added, which makes updating core and marketplace add-ons easier
Symphony-like console commands
Modules are now completely self-contained and not distributed among multiple root-level directories
Improved dependency injection makes the code base more modular
Plugins reduce the need to directly override classes, therefore extensions are less likely to break each other
Built in testing suite via PHPUnit, easily extended to add in new automatic tests for custom features

Future Improvements and Releases:

Arguably the main reason to move to Magento 2 is that Magento 2 is a much more modern software compared to Magento 1 that will be improved more and more frequently as the community around it grows. With almost 2 years in production, it is time more and more merchants seriously consider moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2 or move from another eCommerce platform to Magento 2. Magento 2.2 is scheduled to release in the coming months and will bring even more major improvements to Magento 2.
Extensions are finally catching up and more and more extensions are being released for Magento 2 so a lack of marketplace extensions is no long an excuse not to move to Magento 2.