7 Ways to Get a Magento 2 Migration Right for SMBs

Do you run your website on Magento 1 or Magento 2? If you’re still on Magento 1, take notice that Adobe officially announced it will stop Magento 1 support at the end of June 2020. After that, your eCommerce store could be more vulnerable to security violations, performance problems, and module updates as you maintain it on your own.

Making the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration will give you access to multiple great features and enhancements — better performance, advanced SEO, improved checkout, strong security, and marketing automation.

In this article, we provide recommendations on how to make a smooth Magento 2 migration.

A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE MIGRATION PROCESS

The process of upgrading from Magento 1 to Magento 2includes three major steps: pre-migration, migration, and post-migration.

• Pre-migration: During this stage, we review the website's data and content to get a clear idea of how much manual labor should be performed, prepare design specifications, and write a project outline with major stages and deadlines for each phase.

• Migration: The migration process starts with setting up a testing environment by moving Magento 2 on a new server. Then themes, extensions, plugins, data, and content are moved from Magento 1 to Magento 2. 

• Post-migration: Last but not least is synchronizing your order history and customer data to perform a smooth shift from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

If you’re considering a Magento 2 upgrade, bear in mind that the migration process can be time-consuming, taking anywhere between three to six months, depending on the complexity of your existing shop. This period can be prolonged if you stumble into pitfalls.

Here are the common challenges.

MAGENTO 2 DATA MIGRATION ISN’T AS EASY AS DRAGGING AND DROPPING

Magento 2 data migration is the crucial stage in the transfer process. You need to possess sufficient technical knowledge and extensive experience to react quickly in case you lose database assets — specifically, the customer and product data. Moreover, your blog content, meta titles, and customer orders should be transported inseparably.

MESSY CODE AND SHODDY DATA STRUCTURE MAY MEAN A LOT FOR CUSTOM DEVELOPMENT

During the migration period, you might face problems related to data structure. For example, if the core Magento 1 code is messy or inappropriately configured, then the standard Migration Tool and scripts won’t work.

SEO PERFORMANCE AFTER MAGENTO MIGRATION

Search engine optimization (SEO) can make or break your eCommerce business. Magento 2 has introduced many improvements to SEO, such as Auto-Generation and Schema.org features. Auto-Generation is aimed to set templates for product metadata, and Schema.org could help to boost the search engine ranking of your eCommerce store. Many merchants choose Magento 2 specifically for its advanced SEO features

HOW TO APPLY EXTENSIONS IN MAGENTO 2 ENVIRONMENT

The core of Magento has a great variety of extensions available on Magento Marketplace that add new features and functionalities for marketing, checkout, customer support, payment solutions, shipping, etc.

Extensions that run on Magento 1 store can’t be copied during migration; they simply won’t work. You will need to replace all existing extensions with the ones that have similar features, but for Magento 2.

Luckily, most of the Magento 1 extensions have been created for Magento 2, so it’s quite easy to migrate settings and data. Moreover, many merchants can now take advantage of Magento 2 core features that could be added in Magento 1 only by custom development or Magento 1 extensions integration.

Note: The process of installing extensions and updating features became simpler because of new technologies (HTML5, CSS3, Require.js) integrated into Magento 2

HOW TO APPLY EXTENSIONS IN MAGENTO 2 ENVIRONMENT

The core of Magento has a great variety of extensions available on Magento Marketplace that add new features and functionalities for marketing, checkout, customer support, payment solutions, shipping, etc.

Extensions that run on Magento 1 store can’t be copied during migration; they simply won’t work. You will need to replace all existing extensions with the ones that have similar features, but for Magento 2.

Luckily, most of the Magento 1 extensions have been created for Magento 2, so it’s quite easy to migrate settings and data. Moreover, many merchants can now take advantage of Magento 2 core features that could be added in Magento 1 only by custom development or Magento 1 extensions integration.

MIGRATION IS A PERFECT TIME TO DEAL WITH ALL DESIGN IMPERFECTIONS

Migration is the perfect opportunity to refresh the design and rethink the customer experience. Just like extensions, Magento 1 templates are incompatible with Magento 2. The reason is that Magento 2 uses modern architecture and has different front-end and back-end requirements, so it’s impossible to convert the code built in your Magento 1 theme.

Reference link https://magento.com/blog/best-practices/7-ways-get-magento-2-migration-right-smbs

If you want to create a unique and spontaneous for your eCommerce store we suggest you to hire a top-notch Magento 2 development company and we suggest you to go with Axton Group, a full-stack Magento 2 development company based in NJ, NYC. To know more visit their site www.axtongroup.com or call on 610-209-3937