Last updated on April 7th, 2024 at 10:31 am

Although Magento 2 was released way back in 2015, some merchants still rely on Magento 1 to power their e-commerce stores.  However, the Magento team have officially announced that they have ended its support for Magento 1 from June of 2020. So, for merchants that rely on Magento 1, it’s high time to migrate their website to Magento 2, the more advanced version of Magento.

In this blog post, we will jump right in the step by step process of migrating from Magento 1.x to Magento 2. So, let’s kick start your migration to Magento 2!

Why is it important to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2?

As far as an e-commerce business is concerned, Migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is one of the best business decisions they can probably make. Merchants who stick with Magento’s legacy version can compromise their customer data and could face difficulty integrating new features into their store along the road. When compared to Magento 1, Magento 2 offers great customizations, high scalability, and increased flexibility to all sizes of businesses who are planning to build feature rich and user friendly e-commerce websites with faster response times.

Magento 2: Features that are worth the upgrade

The latest version of Magento ships with powerful features that deliver increased performance and usability. Below are some of the cool features that come along with the new update.

1. Faster Checkout Time: With the new version of Magento, you can significantly reduce your shopping cart abandonment rates as Magento 2 comes with improved and faster checkout. This can also positively contribute to your overall customer satisfaction and revenue.

2. Updated Tech Stack: Magento 2 is updated with the latest versions of languages and frameworks such as Knockout.js, Varnish, PHP7,  HTML5, MySQL,  CSS3, and more. Additionally, Magento 2 is now more optimized for a variety of mobile devices.

3. Magento Commerce Cloud: In Magento 2, the Enterprise Edition is now known as Magento Commerce Cloud and is integrated with cloud infrastructure hosting and Magento commerce. It now supports a variety of cool features such as live production, integration with Git, etc.

4. Reduced Loading Time: E-commerce websites that run on Magento 2 will now load faster as they have significantly minimized the overall loading time without full caching. An e-commerce site that loads faster will have a low bounce rate which ultimately brings more conversions.

Best Practices and Recommendations to Follow Before Migration:

Following these best practices before initializing migration can help to speed your migration process. Apart from that, it also helps your development team to accurately forecast the time required to complete the migration. It is highly recommended to remove outdated data such as visitor records, activity data, logs, etc from your Magento 1 DB. You should also suspend all admin activities on both versions while you migrate actual data. In the case of Magento Commerce, archiving all orders is also one of the best practices you can follow during your migration.

Magento Migration Process

Step#1:  Build a Migration Plan

Building a migration plan is one one the fundamental steps you should take before initiating migration. You have to meet the below requirements before you run the Migration Tool:

1. Ensure that the data migration tool is connected to Magento 1 and Magento 2 DB. Additionally, you must make sure to open ports in your firewall for effective cross-communication of the migration tool with the databases
2. Before you install extensions to your new site, carefully review your current extensions, and check their compatibility with Magento 2.
3. For better capacity planning, Identify the DB assets from your extensions that you want to migrate.

Step#2:  Setup a Testing Environment

You should only perform the migration on a separate test environment (it is recommended to assign a separate server during migration) so that you can eliminate maintenance time on your current e-commerce website. Also, you must duplicate your existing database as the source data for the migration. During this process, configure the source control after installing Magento 2. This will ensure that everything is up and running before initiating the migration. In order to improve migration performance, it is highly recommended to reduce network latency to a bare minimum.

Planning to migrate your online store to Magento 2? Outsource your migration project to the Magento eCommerce development company in India.

Step#3:  Data Migration

Every data except layouts, media, access configurations, and files can be transferred in bulk without hassle using the automated tool that Magento offers. You can use this tool to migrate your settings and website data. During the migration process, you must send all the activities(including Magento 1 Cron jobs) that are performed in the Magento 1 admin panel. However, you can ignore other activities such as shipping and order management. Soon after this process is finished, you can manually copy your Magento 1 media assets to Magento 2.

Step#4:  Launch Magento 2 on a Live Server

Launching Magento 2 on a live server is the last step involved in the Magento migration process. Follow the steps below to launch Magento on a live server:

1. Keep your existing system in maintenance mode and suspend all incremental updates. Your customers will encounter slight downtime during this process.
2. After initializing Magento 2 Cron jobs, reindex all available indexers.
3. Perform a final review of your Magento 2 site.