On June 30, 2020, we bid our farewell to Magento 1. For 12 years, this CMS has been a safe haven for online stores all over the globe – over 25,000 to be precise. Shortly after Adobe acquired Magento in 2018, the company has announced that they will end the support of the system and offered their customers, partners, and developers help transitioning to the new and improved Magento 2.
Over more than a decade, Magento 1 revolutionized the world of online business. Yet some companies still hesitate to embrace Magento 2, even a year after it has been introduced. The main reason for this being associated issues and hurdles that might endanger the way these businesses run.
Scared if website customizations will survive the switch, or whether all features and saved data will migrate unharmed? Will the Magento 1 themes run as smoothly on Magento 2? Let’s take a look at the most common Magento 2 migration issues and find out how to address them — all to avoid technical glitches and overhead costs.
Like any other change in life, migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 posed certain risks to business owners. Based on the feedback Elogic got from the clients, we were able to pin down the most popular reasons why they chose to stay on Magento 1 just a little while longer or simply hesitated to move to Magento 2.
A common misconception is that a business has to be shut down during migration. Yes, the process takes a while (one to three months depending on store size), but business owners are free to continue operating as usual. Website speed might slow down to some extent during and/or after the migration, but the losses can be minimized or avoided altogether.
Solution: You can improve Magento 2 performance by:
Or better yet – leaving the migration process to specialists who can achieve zero downtime for your website and make sure that the transition process goes smoothly and no speed loss will occur in the future. Our Elogic tip to do this is to migrate the website at night during low sales season.
For planned downtime, retailers can put up friendly signs for the shoppers:
When working on the TurcomUSA migration, we at Elogic had one main goal: to create a website that is going to be fast and functional, even with all the newly added integrations. The collaboration was a success and grew into a long-lasting partnership that brought us even more fascinating projects.
As eCommerce depends highly on their SEO and search engine rankings, changes in URL structure caused by the migration can cause a fuss. You can witness a drop in page ranks or erroneous redirects from old to new pages, duplicate pages, localization issues, loss in traffic, and lower sales.
Solution: Magento 2 has its own advanced native SEO tools. All SEO issues can be resolved by tweaking Magento SEO settings. You can see the Elogic info sheet and see if you can do it yourself or with the help of a Magento SEO consultant.
Owning a lot of personal and financial information, eCommerce websites are always a target for hackers. A hacked online store can lead to data leakage, fraud, and loss of customers. While Magento 1 wasn’t famous for its security, Magento 2 is definitely a huge step-up, definitely one of the most secure CMS in the world. Which should be the ultimate reason to transition.
Solution: Generally, to avoid any and all security issues with Magento 2, avoid low-quality third-party extensions which pose the biggest threat. Do your research, get your Magento 2 modules from verified vendors, or get Magento professionals to protect your website from hacks and malware.
What might not look like the most important among Magento 2 migration issues, is still a problem that can scare away customers from an online store and bring major losses. Customized themes or extensions used for a Magento 1 website might not migrate well and may result in poor user experience (UX).
Some Magento 1 extensions may not exist in Magento 2 or simply wouldn’t function properly. As a result, business owners face compatibility issues and extra expenses, and customers have trouble shopping and checking out.
Solution: Well begun is half done. Find out in advance what extensions fit your business needs and are compatible with Magento 2, or find a new theme that you can customize according to your requirements.
To help business owners who decided to take the leap and migrate, MageWorx has added ‘migration’ possibilities to their most popular solutions. Being one of the pioneers in Magento extensions development, the company knows all about the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration challenges.
If you don’t want to deal with it yourself, get professional help like Roller Rabbit did. When they came to us at Elogic asking for help migrating their platform, we saw an opportunity to not just carry out a safe transition, but also fix some design flaws and revamp the layout for a stronger online presence.
Losing crucial data stored on a website could result in losing customer trust and a lot of money. All login data, content and previous records, and CMS pages must be securely transferred from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Solution: One way would be of course to get a Magento migration consultant, but there are also ways to prepare for a safe migration on your own. For instance, backup your data in several locations, and/or divide your data into parts and migrate them from most to least important block after block. This way, you’ll avoid risks associated with data transfer and save time.
With Magento 2, there wasn’t just new technology added, but the entire platform was essentially re-written. New EAV architecture, Varnish technology, ObjectManager, Declarative Schema – the fact that most of this needs to be learned from scratch has, of course, raised some eyebrows.
Solution: Learning all this isn’t impossible, and maybe even desirable for some. The Adobe Commerce Developer Guide has a lot of helpful guides and resources. You can also hire a Magento developer to save time and make sure the migration goes smoothly.
Solid website architecture helps it sustain heavy traffic, and go through store customizations and technical updates without hiccups. What if migration shakes up the architecture?
Solution: Taking care of architectural elements during migration yourself is one way to go. But probably the best way to keep them safe when transitioning is to let Magento specialists handle all necessary ecommerce architecture elements. For instance, Sulalat Coffee saw the transition as a big step to improve its ecommerce back-office operations. We helped them not only re-design but also add PayPal and numerous other third-party integrations.
Sometimes, the reason that prevents business owners from transferring to Magento 2 is the costs associated with the process. Depending on your business goals, theme, and extensions, you can choose one of several Magento editions.
Solution: The wisest solution is to dig deep into all the possibilities Magento 2 offers and the price for each of them. Take into account what functionality and maintenance your website needs, and you may discover that the costs aren’t as high as you thought they would be.
As we see, there’s more than just one challenge associated with the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration. It is possible to solve them on one’s own, but this will take time and effort, which some can’t afford. It’s just not always possible to quickly teach company workers to deal with new technology in order to preserve architecture, website speed, and security. Some companies probably don’t even have workers with the necessary knowledge.
To address all Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration challenges at once, and to make it quick and get great results, hiring a Magento development company is always a good idea. Here’s what you get from working with Elogic:
Get a professional agency to take care of all the associated issues
Hire your team of Magento professionals now
