Keep Shopware 5 stable and secure

It can be, but only with active maintenance: PHP and server patches, plugin updates, and monitoring. The risk is not that it stops working — it is that a known vulnerability stays open because nobody is watching. If you are on 5, you need someone maintaining it.

Not automatically. If the shop is profitable and stable, keep it patched and spend the money elsewhere. Migrate when you need the API, when your plugin vendors drop SW5, or when every small change starts costing two weeks.

Yes, regularly. We start with a paid review of code, database, plugins and hosting and give you a written report with risks and a prioritised plan — even if you then decide to continue with someone else.

Longer than the panic articles suggest, but not indefinitely — and the deadline is rarely Shopware itself. It comes from your PHP version reaching end of life, a payment provider switching off an old interface, or a plugin vendor going quiet. Watch those three, not the version number. When one of them moves, you have months to plan a migration, not a weekend.

Depends on what the investment is. Anything that sits in the data — clean product attributes, deduplicated customers, a sane category tree — moves with you and pays twice. Anything that sits in the Smarty templates dies at the migration, so spend there only if it earns the money back before then. We tell you which bucket your request falls into before we quote it.

Almost never. A slow old shop is usually three concrete things: one plugin firing queries inside a loop, a listing that is not cached, and images delivered at full resolution. We profile first and tell you what we found before touching anything. Migrating to Shopware 6 to gain speed is the most expensive way to solve a problem a day of profiling can name.

It is the thing worth checking first. Older Shopware 5 branches only run on PHP versions that no longer receive security fixes, and your hoster will eventually force the issue. The current 5.7 line runs on newer PHP, so the answer is often an in-place upgrade rather than a migration. We check what your shop and your plugins actually tolerate before recommending anything.