Introduction
How to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2?
Since its release in July 2015, Magento 2 has gained all the focus and strength and has almost replaced Magento 1. This E-commerce platform is totally different from Magento 1 in the terms of Architecture and consists of many new features. Magento 2 supports PHP 7, full page cache by default, and faster than Magento 1. It has improved indexers, database optimizations, and user-friendly checkout methods and has become the number one choice of E-commerce store merchants.Â
Steps to Prepare for a Magento 2 Upgrade
Considering the SEO parameters of your website, migrating your entire website is not a good idea. Your top-ranking pages, indexed pages, and overall discoverability gets affected. Not only this but all the data, extensions, configuration files, and other digital assets that Magento 1 stores are also compromised.Â
To avoid these issues, here are some simple steps that you need to follow:
- Never put your Magento 1 store at risk. Make a clone of your store on a separate server and start working with that.
- Make sure your current Magento 1 extensions, themes, and code workarounds have forward compatibility. If they’re not compatible with Magento 2, you’re going to lose them.
- Taking backups of your Magento store is one of the most important practices you must follow. Always keep multiple backups of your store’s most significant versions.
- You must retain all the SEO-driven traffic your current Magento 1 store has. Analyze your high performing keywords, sitemaps, robot.txt files, and any other SEO-related data that you can find in your Google Analytics or Google Search Console. We recommend working with an SEO expert while you do this.
- Keep your migration process light. Get rid of any unwanted or useless data from your current eCommerce store.
It is safe to follow the Official Magento Migration Documentation, according to which, the process is divided into four stages.
- Theme Migration
- Extension Migration
- Customizations Migration
- Data Migration
Each step is explained in the simplified manner below!
- Theme Migration
- Magento 1 theme can’t be migrated directly to Magento 2. However, you may create a custom theme or install one of them from Magento Marketplace.
- Extension Migration
- The Magento 1 extensions won’t be compatible with Magento 2. Install useful Magento 2 extensions for the store. Till date, there are no official tools to migrate extensions from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
- Customizations Migration
- There are high chances that your store would be running on custom code. So you must migrate the custom code to Magento 2 safely. You may use the Code Migration Toolkit for easier migration.
- Data Migration
- The last step includes data migration of customers, orders, products, store configurations, etc. The store data is valuable and can’t be lost at any cost. Hence, you may take the help of the Magento 2 Data Migration Tool. The tool helps to migrate the database of Magento 1 to Magento 2, making it compatible with the new structure.
The process to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2 does not stop here! You need to test the Magento 2 store’s functionality thoroughly.
Moving ahead, let’s see the installation and configuration of the Magento 2 Data Migration Tool!
Frequently Asked Questions
- Choose a partner that cares about its clients.
- Never compromise on technology experience and domain expertise.
- Check out your development partners’ portfolios, customer testimonials, and references.
- Observe how they approach communication and how much they pay attention to your vision.
- Ask the right questions to help you choose easily.
- The average outsourcing charges in India are $18 – $40, which is way more affordable than in developed countries like the USA, $38 – $63.
- India has a large pool of native-English speakers who’re highly proficient in their work.
- With an Indian outsourcing partner, you can access 24×7 support and specialized IT talent.