Why moving to Lightning Experience should be on your priority list for 2020.

1. The new layout will feel familiar 

As the last add-on of July 2020 (summer ’20 release), there will be a full view layout that will briefly show the add-on all related lists and paths in the header of the record page. Very useful for those customers who would like to see all their information in one location without having to switch between tabs, and so on.

2. A greatly improved user interface 

One of the major differences between Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning is the user interface. For example, Lightning pages are easier to navigate, which makes Lightning more convenient for everyday work than Classic.

3. New Apexchange store Apps are only made for Salesforce Lightning

AppExchange is the Salesforce store that enables companies to extend the functionality of Salesforce with valuable and/or necessary apps.
In the past, you had to check if an app was ready for Lightning. Nowadays, apps are made exclusively for Lightning. This means that classic users can only use old apps, which most likely won’t be updated.

4. The same desktop experience on your phone

Built on top of the Lightning Platform is the Salesforce Lightning App. All customization done in Lightning is instantly accessible on any mobile device that uses the App. This means Salesforce is fully available to you while you’re on the go.

5. Updated every 4 months:

As a Classic user, you don’t get any major new updates or new features while Lightning is updated every 4 months. This means that you pay the same price while you get obsolete products and miss out on a lot of great productivity features and improvements.

6. It saves money in the long run:

The lightning-improved user interface offers features such as drag-and-drop functionality that can be achieved without any code. Instead of hiring a Salesforce developer to create or customize a Salesforce page, the page can easily be rearranged by an admin by dragging and dropping the components as desired.

7. New features only available for Lightning

Here are 3 examples of new features that will be available exclusively for Lightning from July 2020 (summer ’20 release):

Dynamic forms – As an admin, this is what you’ve been waiting for. It’s so great it deserves a blog post on its own. But so as not to keep you waiting for the next post, here’s a short tutorial explaining what it’s capable of:

Einstein Search (free) – This Einstein tool is so smart, it learns from every user, displays records with more context, gives you suggested search results, and enables natural language processing. All this allows your users to get personalized and usable search results within Salesforce. In Salesforce’s own words, “Using Einstein Search can reduce clicks and load pages by up to 50% for the most common tasks, such as editing sales records” (Salesforce.com blog).

Split view for standard navigation in list view – This view allows users to see their list view data as well as a selected record. This allows you to view the record without navigating away from the page.

8. Last but not least: Salesforce Lightning offers better security

Free of charge within Lightning is the LockerService function. It separates Lightning components so they can communicate with each other. This helps protect the platform from malicious data. Salesforce Classic does not offer any features that can be compared to it.

Closing note

If all these major Lightning Experience enhancements and new functionalities are not enough to motivate you to switch from Classic, remember that delaying the migration too long can have a significant negative impact on your organization.
You take the risk of functionality loss due to a lack of updates. Classic hasn’t had major updates for a while now and it looks like it won’t be on the Salesforces’ agenda in the future. Salesforce even stops the Salesforce for Outlook connector. This app will retire in December 2020 when Lightning Experience ends its extensive support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.

All new Salesforce innovations happen only in Lightning Experience.
– Salesforce –

According to Bluewolf’s State of Salesforce 2020 report, 45% of organizations already use Lightning Experience. This means that in a while there will be less online community support available, while you may experience more compatibility issues and loss of functionality at the same time. Migrating to Salesforce Lightning seems time consuming and expensive. But if you migrate to Salesforce Lightning before problems arise, it can save your business unnecessary time, money, and hassle in the long run.