It’s been more than a year since the release of Magento 2.0 — an almost complete rewriting of the enormously popular eCommerce application, and yet many eCommerce retailers have yet to upgrade.

I understand why. An eCommerce store is the central plank of any modern retail business, and those businesses depend on the reliability and availability of their Magento store. If a store based on Magento 1 continues to work, and continues to be supported with security patches, it might be hard to see why an eCommerce retailer should invest the time and energy to update.

After all, many of the features available in Magento 2 are made available in Magento 1 through extensions, and a store that has worked well for several years shows no obvious sign of needing an update.

But, an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach isn’t appropriate where software is concerned. There will come a time when older versions of Magento are no longer supported. We’ve seen what happens to old and unsupported WordPress sites, and on a long-enough time-frame, the same thing will happen to Magento stores.

What’s So Great About Magento 2.0?

There are far too many improvements in Magento 2 to cover them all, but let’s have a look at a few stand-outs.

• Performance — Magento 2 offers full-page caching, CSS pre-processing, and many other low-level changes to the application that allow it to perform better while using fewer resources.
• Mobile-friendly — Magento 2 is designed for a mobile world. It’s easier to create a truly great mobile retail experience when your eCommerce store is designed from the ground-up with responsiveness in mind.
• Streamlined Checkout — Magento 1’s checkout experience was bad, but the eCommerce world has changed, and so have user expectations. Magento 2 provides a streamlined, elegant checkout process that helps encourage sales and reduce cart abandonment.
• Improved search — Solr was Magneto’s search stalwart for many years, but it wasn’t without limitations. Elastic is faster, easier to configure, and integrates better with Magento.

There’s No Going Back

The features I just mentioned are all compelling, but the best reason to move to Magento 2 is that technology doesn’t move backwards. Magento 2 is engineered for the modern web, using modern web technologies. It’s an almost complete rewrite based on modern design and development best practices, and all future improvements to the Magento ecosystem that leverage modern web technologies will be focused on Magento 2.

If you don’t move to Magento 2, you don’t have access to the most modern eCommerce platform, and you deny your business the efficiency, performance, and innovation that could take it to the next level.