When is Magento 1 Support Ending?

Update: Magento 1 Support End Date – June 2020. Magento announced on their blog that they will stop supporting the Magento 1.x version in June 2020.

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Magento 2 was released in November 2015 with much excitement. As Magento 2 is a completely different architecture in comparison to version 1, there was speculation that support for Magento 1 would discontinue in the very near future. Magento had then confirmed this speculation and in fact, Magento announced that November 18th, 2018 was the date at which Magento 1 support would end.

Unlike Magento 1, upgrading using software and security patches does not allow one to upgrade to Magento 2. Instead, upgrading a website to Magento 2 means developing a new website altogether. This hard cut-off date caused a sense of panic for Magento 1 website owners and there was an urgent need for every Magento website owner to either create a new Magento 2 website or switch CMS platforms altogether.

There were many things to do with so little time. Along with creating all those new websites in Magento 2 for existing Magento customers, developers and extension suppliers had to make Magento 2 compatible extensions as soon as possible so they can replace their Magento 1 extensions, which was simply not possible before the cut-off date. Magento realised the impracticality of this and soon revoked the cut-off-date, confirming that Magento 1 support will remain for the “foreseeable future” and that any such cut-off date will be announced with 18-months of prior notice.

While there are still a few security patches being released for Magento 1 with the latest version being 1.9.3.9 (at the time of writing this blog), development focus has completely shifted to Magento 2 so these patches are limited with no major development changes. As of today, there are new releases of Magento 2 almost every month, with the latest version of Magento 2 being 2.2.5 (at the time of writing this blog).

So to conclude, if you currently have a Magento 1 website, there is no urgent need to upgrade to Magento 2. Security patches are still being released so technically speaking, your site will be up-to-date if you continue to apply all the version 1 updates as they are released. That being said, as there is no longer any Magento 1 development focus combined with the fact that version 1 support will end at some point, it is recommended that Magento 1 website owners consider moving to Magento 2. Doing this sooner rather than later will allow you to take advantage of the software improvements Magento 2 offers and also avoid the panic of a hard cut-off date when it’s announced.

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