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Magento, the open source ecommerce platform provider, has announced that it will no longer be providing support for Magento 1 as of June 2020.

No support means greater risks

Without support, the CMS is likely to develop vulnerabilities which can lead to a higher level of risk for websites. One example of a possible attack is Magecart, the web-based, card skimming attack that aims to steal credit card information through checkout pages.

Adobe’s Magento is a popular choice among eretailers and ecommerce sites, accounting for 12% of all ecommerce sites as of 2019, according to Hosting Tribunal.

The number of active sites using Magento nearly doubled between 2017 and 2018, growing to 250,000. Of these, brands such as Ford, Omega Watches, Christian Louboutin and Bulgari use the service.

According to Hosting Tribunal, only 11,000 run on Magento 2. The popularity of Magento is arguably down to its versatility, variety of features and ease of use.

When June 2020 rolls around, Megento will discontinue support including software updates and security patches for its Commerce 1 and Open Source CMS platforms, which were previously known as Enterprise Edition and Community Edition respectively.

Where to go from here

From here, ecommerce sites using the service have two obvious options: upgrade to Magento 2 or migrate to another CMS. According to some, the upgrade to Magento 2 is laborious and costly, which may result in customers choosing option two, a new CMS.

However, Magento is quick to promote the benefits of Magento Commerce 2, including improved cloud-hosted performance at scale, smoother creation and launch of content, and more business intelligence capabilities.

According to the company, as a result of a growing community around Magento 2, there are now more than 2,000 available extensions, new capabilities launching every quarter with version 2.3 next to come, and more than 8,000 new quarterly Magento 2 site launches on top of 30,000 existing Magento 2 sites.

Regardless of their final choice, Magento encourages all Magento Commerce 1 customers to get in touch with their Customer Success Managers or development partners to start upgrade planning.