Like every professional ecommerce platform, Magento / Adobe Commerce is constantly maintained and upgraded to keep up with evolving technologies, opportunities, and threats.
For example, PHP, the web development script language at the base of Magento, evolves. This requires Magento to evolve too, and therefore it affects the life cycle of the various Magento releases.
Maintaining all the existing releases of Magento would be impossible for any company, so Adobe regularly ends the support of old Magento / Adobe Commerce releases. This is also called EOL. In software terms, EOL means End Of Life.
My unsupported Magento eCommerce works perfectly well, why should I upgrade it?
Some merchants wait until the last minute (or after that) before pulling the trigger and deciding to update their Magento eCommerce. Waiting a little can make sense.
The early adopters of a new eCommerce release act a bit as guinea pigs, immediately benefitting from the upgrade but potentially exposing themselves to undiscovered issues.
At Pixie Media Agency, we often agree with clients that want to wait a bit before upgrading. At the other end of the spectrum, there are merchants that wait for way too long, using discontinued releases for years after their end of support. This is bad, but it is understandable. After all, a Magento eCommerce website will probably continue to operate beyond the end of support of the software at its core. And a skilled eCommerce agency, also leveraging the Magento community, will probably be able to keep patching the system. But at some point plugins, add-ons, modules, integration, etc, will stop working. These might be proprietary to their publishers, and not patchable by your eCommerce agency. Some modules might be business critical and their failure might disrupt operations, affect sales, open vulnerabilities, etc.
When does the support of Magento / Adobe Commerce end?The good news is that releases are planned, published and advertised well in advance.
The current calendar, today 12th of September 2022, looks like this:
Adobe Commerce 2.3 End of Support: September 2022
Adobe Commerce 2.4.0-2.4.3 End of Support: November 2022
Adobe Commerce 2.4.4-2.4.6 End of Support: November 2024
You can find out more on the official Adobe page here.
Login to your Admin panel, and look in the bottom right corner of the screen. You should see something like this:
It’s sometimes possible to paste /magento_version at the end of your web address, so https://www.[yourURLhere].co.uk/magento_version.
How long does it take, and how much does it cost to upgrade Magento?This is obviously depending on the complexity of your eCommerce website, and it’s very difficult if not impossible to provide any indication on this.
A critical factor to take into consideration is where you are coming from. Upgrading a system that is still based on Magento 2.2 is more complex than upgrading a system from Magento 2.4.4 to 2.4.5.
Upgrading one simple website, with one single currency and storefront, retail, with simple products, is way more complex than upgrading a multiple currency and multiple storefront, retail and wholesale, multilingual eCommerce that sells the same customizable products to B2B and B2C customers.
Additionally, you might need to purchase new versions of modules of plugins you currently use, or to find alternatives if those modules and plugins are no longer available.
At Pixie Media, we have seen a minimum of 10h for a client that has a very simple shop, an average of 50h, and a maximum that is multiples of that.
Typically, your eCommerce agency will be able to give you an estimate of the time that the upgrade can take.
Don't wait!