Still on Magento 1 in 2026? Equitana Moved in Five Days

Adobe ended support for Magento 1 on 30 June 2020, and the security patches from that month were the last, according to Help Net Security. Six years later, some stores still sell on it. Equitana was one of them until August 2026.

Equitana sells riding equipment, horse care products and stable accessories. The store ran on Blugento, a hosted platform built on Magento 1. We moved it to Magento 2 and Hyvä, and the new store was ready in five days. All the figures are in the Equitana case study. This post covers the part that matters if your store is still on Magento 1: what staying costs you, what options you have, and what a move that doesn't take a year looks like.

What Magento 1 means in 2026

• Security: no official patch from Adobe since June 2020. Any vulnerability found since then stays open, unless you fix it yourself or pay a separate vendor to.
• Card payments: the PCI DSS standard requires the vendor's security patches. PayPal told merchants back in 2020 that an unpatched Magento 1 store exposes them to breaches and compliance problems.
• Speed: in its last full month on Magento 1, the slowest quarter of Equitana's phone visits waited more than 4.2 seconds for the main content and more than 3.6 seconds for the server's first response. Lighthouse scored the mobile pages 36 and 37 out of 100.
• Google: on 27 August 2026, Search Console rated only 3 of 1,395 measured phone pages as good, or 0.2%. The store failed Core Web Vitals on both phones and desktops.

Your options

In short, there are 4 roads, each with its own price:

• Stay on Magento 1 with community patches. The OpenMage LTS project released security fixes in 2026 too, in versions 20.17.0 and 20.18.0, from April and May. You buy time, but the store stays just as slow, with the same old extensions.
• Switch platforms. Shopify, WooCommerce or another solution means a different theme, different extensions and different processes. A catalog of more than 14,500 products, like Equitana's, has a lot to move. The comparison is in our guide to choosing a platform.
• Build Magento 2 from scratch. Full control, but also the longest road, because the theme, the checkout and the integrations are all built again. Realistic timelines are in the post on how long a Hyvä project takes.
• Start from a ready-made Magento 2 platform. That is what we did for Equitana. Liquid Framework is Magento 2 with Hyvä and Hyvä Checkout, plus the modules a Romanian store uses every day, maintained by us. How it differs from a project built from scratch is explained in the post on accelerator packages.

Why five days were enough

The five days didn't go into the basics. Checkout, couriers, payments and search were already built into the platform, so the time went into Equitana's catalog, content and customers. From day one, the store had:

• Hyvä Checkout on a single page, with delivery through Innoship and card payments through EuPlatesc;
• Algolia search, a delivery estimate on the product page and back-in-stock alerts;
• a GDPR privacy center, a support form and stock synced automatically from the ERP.

What moves: everything, addresses included

Moving off Magento 1 doesn't mean starting with an empty store. At Equitana we moved more than 14,500 products, over 3,000 of them with options such as size and color, more than 300 categories, more than 3,400 customer accounts and more than 12,000 orders going back to 2019.

Product and category addresses stayed the same. The Kids category (Copii), for example, stayed at /produse/calaret-1/copii.html, so old links, customers' bookmarks and pages already in Google still lead to the right place.

4 things to check before you move

The catalog is the visible part. These are the things most easily lost in any move off Magento 1:

• Content outside the catalog: the blog, CMS pages and guides. Pull every type of address that brings clicks out of Search Console, not just products and categories. Anything that doesn't move needs a 301 redirect, page by page, to the closest live page, never in bulk to the home page.
• Filtered pages: a category with 5 filters can generate thousands of addresses. Put "noindex, follow" on filtered lists before launch, so Google doesn't index them.
• robots.txt and the sitemap: a robots.txt inherited from Magento 1 can block files or pages the new store needs, and the old sitemap stays submitted in Search Console. Check both on launch day.
• What you actually own: on a hosted platform, find out early whether you get a copy of the database, the files and the content. The full list is in the post on what you should own when you work with a Magento agency.

What changed after a month

We followed the real Chrome data week by week, until the whole 28-day window was on the new store. The result, at the 75th percentile:

• Main content on phones: from 4.2 s to 1.1 s. On desktop, from 3.5 s to 1.0 s.
• Server response on phones: from 3.7 s to 0.34 s.
• Core Web Vitals: failed before, passed now, on phones and desktops. On 26 September, Search Console rated all 1,761 measured phone pages as good, or 100%.
• Instant pages: 53% of phone page views open instantly. 26.7% are prepared in advance, and 25.9% come back from the browser's cache when the shopper taps back. Before, both were at zero.

We also recorded the same shopping trip on both stores, in Chrome, on the same computer, minutes apart: the home page, two categories, a product, adding to cart and going to checkout. On Magento 1, the 6 steps added up to 19.5 seconds of waiting. On the new store, 2.1 seconds.

Checkout: from 5 steps to a single page

The Magento 1 checkout opened one panel at a time: starting the order, billing, shipping, delivery method and payment, so 5 steps. Hyvä Checkout shows contact details, address, delivery and payment on a single page, with the order summary always in view. How it connects to Romanian payment processors and couriers is covered in the post on Hyvä Checkout for Romanian stores.

What you can do this week

• Check the version: if the store is on Magento 1 and doesn't get OpenMage patches, its last official patch is from June 2020.
• Look at the real data: open the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console. At Equitana, on Magento 1, only 0.2% of phone pages were rated good.
• Count what you need to move: products, variants, categories, customers, orders and the pages outside the catalog. It's the list every estimate starts with.
• Time a shopping trip: go through the 6 steps above with a stopwatch, on a phone and on a computer. At Equitana, on a computer, they took 19.5 seconds on Magento 1. How to time them frame by frame is in the six-step test guide.

Still on Magento 1, or on a store that's just as slow? Book a free strategy call. We'll look at your store's real data together and tell you what the move would involve.