Magento 1 to PWA: What’s in it for merchants?

As previously announced in September 2018, Adobe ended support for the 12-year-old Magento 1 release line for both Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source on June 30, 2020.

Since end-of-life for Magento 1 was announced, we’ve been working closely with customers, partners, and developers on transition plans.

Although thousands of merchants have already migrated to Magento 2, there are many eCommerce businesses who are still operating on the M1 platform.

This is why we made the decision to develop an ‘Accelerator Programme’, to support these merchants with making a transition to Magento 2, but with integrated Progressive Web App (PWA) functionality.

PWA is a mobile-first approach. It combines the best of both worlds for websites and native apps by adopting the UX of an app, whilst operating as a website. This means a PWA has all the benefits of a shopping app, without the additional costs of development, deployment and marketing.

Some of the benefits for users include:

4x faster speed
Offline functionality
Mobile-responsive design
Instant app download from desktop.

But how does this translate for the eCommerce businesses who invest in PWA? And why should you be looking to jump ahead and make the investment now rather than at a later date?

You’re investing in the future – rather than what will soon become a legacy platform. In 2018, Anton Kril, the Director of Architecture at Magento announced that the current Magento will be deprecated and replaced with PWA once PWA Studio becomes generally available. Making that investment sooner rather than later will save development costs in the long run. Not to mention the shorter-term savings you’ll be reaping on operational costs…
PageBuilder & Headless Architecture – which means content changes to the site can be quickly deployed by your in-house team, less time spent on development and deployment.
A faster site speed = more conversion – For example – Google/Deloit studies found improving your load time by just 0.1s can boost conversion rates by 8%. Using this 0.8 second speed increase with 800,000 visitors, AOV of £150 and 3% conversion rate would have an estimated revenue increase of over £3.2million/year.
Increase on mobile conversions – where some of our clients have seen uplifts of up to 200%. This of course also results in an increase in revenue as described above.
Increased brand engagement and loyalty – thanks to offline functionalities and the ability to download the app direct from the homepage.

We appreciate that PWA is still a relatively new technology – we were actually the very first agency to successfully develop and deploy PWA on the Magento platform for our client UKMeds back in 2019! We’ve since led a further 4 highly successful PWA projects that have all realised equally impressive results. So this isn’t just another buzzword!

The fact that the technology is relatively new shouldn’t put you off making the investment in PWA now if you’re still a Magento 1 merchant though. With the release of Magento 2.4, there is now more support for both merchants and developers on PWA. Becoming an early adopter will put you heads and shoulders above your competition, not to mention the results and fast-growth you’ll obtain. You’ll also be saving on costs in the long-run if you take advantage of our Accelerator Programme.

Like it’s predecessor; Responsive Web Design – PWA is the next evolution for eCommerce experiences and will become the new norm over the next few years. And with COVID-19 meaning that ‘tomorrow has come early’ for our industry; why not make the move now and get two steps ahead?

If you’d like to learn more about our Accelerator Programme and how we can support your eCommerce business, get in touch: breakthrough@wearejh.com