Up to now, over 70% of Magento 1 websites have successfully migrated to Magento 2. What about the remaining Magento 1 stores? Well, most of them are preparing for a Magento 2 upgrade. This post will give a detailed guide about the process of switching between Magento platforms and help current Magento stores quickly transfer and catch up with the majority.
Contents
Why Magento 2 Upgrade?
In spite of being launched and introduced in 2010, Magento 2 has taken a few years to prove its capability and gained trust from the store owners. It has been evaluated as a stable platform, more valuable features, better interface and performance, and easier to monitor than the previous version.
There are a lot of e-businesses who quickly caught up with the new trend and got significant successes with a significantly higher number of conversions and sales, enhanced customer engagement, and more effective site management.
If your web store is now on Magento 1, you should consider the transition soon before being left behind by your competitors!
What Is The Essence Of Magento 2 Upgrade Process?
The Magento 2 upgrade will include Theme migration, Data migration, Extensions migration, and Functions development.
Many people think they can “carry” everything from the Magento 1 site to the new one, including the designs, data, and extensions.
But it’s absolutely wrong. There is a tiny thing that you can move to Magento 2 stores.
The reason is that your Magento 1 based store will be rewritten from scratch by using new code base structures, revised database architecture, and many new software components.
It’s true to say that moving to Magento 2 is a re-platforming project, with a data migration exercise to bring in products, customers, and orders from the previous Magento version.
How To Prepare For The Upgrade?
It seems that migrating from Magento 1 to 2 is a complicated and time-consuming process. The majority of store owners are afraid of data loss, security threats, transaction interruptions, etc., happening to their current Magento eCommerce websites during the transition.
However, if you have enough knowledge and thorough preparation for the upgrade, believe me, the above issues are no longer threats.
Let’s follow these steps to have the best preparation for your Magento eCommerce websites!
Step 1: Decide on your website design – Create a brand new template or make a new one based on the old design
The website design is the first thing you should consider when writing a plan for Magento migration.
In general, there are two most common options:
The first one is designing a new Magento 2 template based on your Magento 1 website. This selection will be ideal if you possess a perfect website design, don’t want to change it – and still, keep the PSD file of the template.
The second one is utilizing a totally new Magento 2 template to give your customers a new look at your brand. To do that, you can buy a ready-made template on the market. There are tons of them for different industries and at affordable prices. If you are interested in a certain design of a website, you can clone that template and apply it to your site. It will take nearly 1 month for cloning, depending on the level of design difficulty and complication.
The last case is that you don’t like any available templates or want to have a unique design, you can hire a professional designer to design your site from scratch. In terms of the cost, buying a template is the cheapest choice, and creating a unique design is the most expensive.
In general, most owners will seek and purchase a proper ready-made template for their new Magento eCommerce websites to save time and money.
Step 2: Define which type and amount of data you want to migrate
Your current database might be huge but remember to select only crucial data to migrate to the new site; for example, products, categories, prices, customers, and orders. Some stores also want to migrate product ratings and reviews, testimonials, and so on.
Though this is not a complex phase, you should be cautious because of possible data loss.
Step 3: Examine and filter the current Magento Extensions list, select the ones you want to keep
Scarce Magento eCommerce websites don’t install any extensions to enhance their functionalities and performance.
Regardless of the number of extensions installed on the site right now, you have to review them carefully and determine which are really necessary to keep and move to the new site.
The thing is that…
Actually, you can’t be able to “move” these extensions to your Magento 2 store BUT find “similar” extensions – on Magento 2 version to buy and install on the new site.
Unfortunately, only 50-60% of your Magento 1 plugins have Magento 2 version.
So, what can you do to “migrate” the extensions that haven’t been developed for Magento 2?
The solution is simple: find some prestigious Magento module development companies and ask them to develop custom Magento 2 extensions for you.
Besides, the higher the number of extensions you want to migrate, the more time and money it takes. Therefore, as I have mentioned before, work on your extension list and keep only essential extensions to migrate.
Step 4: Determine which functions you want to migrate/ develop for the new site
In your old site, there might be some custom functions that are not acquired by installed extension, for instance: store pickup, reseller program, auction, etc. Therefore, you have to decide whether to develop these functions on the new site or not.
Moreover, you can take this chance to add more necessary features on the Magento 2 site to provide your shoppers with both better design and functions.
Step 5: Look for a reliable Magento development company to conduct the upgrade
There are three main reasons that you should find an agency to migrate your site to Magento 2 rather than do it yourself:
The first reason is obvious, they have more expertise and experience on Magento 2 upgrade than you since it is their day-by-day task. As a result, they can ensure a smooth and safe migration process without any serious problems like data loss.
The second reason is that they can do it faster than you. For a beginner, it would take an enormous amount of time to find out what can be done and what should be done in the migration, not to mention time for implementation. On the contrary, for a professional company, the total time for Magento migration is just a few weeks.
The third reason is that the cost of hiring a Magento agency to do the upgrade is rational and acceptable. Especially if you co-operate with the outsourcing companies located in Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, or India, where the labor cost is very cheap, they will charge you a very competitive price.
In Short, There Are 5 Essential Questions To Ask
As you can see in the previous parts, there are a lot of things to conduct the Magento 2 upgrade, but let’s make it simple.
Here are 5 questions – presenting the 5 core issues that you have to concern when doing the migration.
1. Will you design a new theme or buy a ready-made one for your new Magento 2 website?
When it comes to Magento 2 upgrade, the first thing that you might consider is your website design theme and templates. As you might know, we can not “bring” the Magento 1 theme to migrate to Magento 2 website.
There are 5 solutions:
First, you can design a new theme from scratch and create an absolutely fresh look for your website/ brand. This option will be ideal if you have talented in-house designers and front-end coders. Otherwise, you can hire professional designers and coders from reliable agencies. It will take at least 1 month to raise ideas, complete the design, and code the front-end interface.
Second, if you want to maintain the Magento 1 theme since your customers are too familiar with this, let’s send the PSD file of that theme to the designer and coder team. They will help you to create a new theme based on the old one with some possible customization.
Third, if you are interested in a specific website theme and want to create a similar one for your website, send it to the developers and ask them to clone that site. The time spent on website cloning will depend on the complexity of your model website.
Fourth, since Magento has been the most popular e-commerce platform up to now, you can easily buy a ready-made Magento 2 theme at reasonable prices. There are thousands of well-designed themes and templates for different industries on the market. In some rare cases, you are selling unique stuff and find it hard to find a perfect-match theme; don’t worry, find a relatively proper one and then customize it.
Fifth, besides the paid themes, you can find plenty of Free Magento 2 Themes and Templates. Here are the Top 100 Magento 2 Responsive Themes and Templates for free download that you should take into consideration.
Among these 5 solutions, we highly recommend the fourth option. Compared to creating a new website design from scratch, selecting an available theme (even with customization) takes considerably less time, money, and effort.
2. Which Magento extensions do you want to keep/ remove? Do they have Magento 2 version?
Similar to the theme, you are not able to move Magento 1 extensions to the new website.
There are 3 problems here:
First, you can no longer use the old modules but – find corresponding extensions with Magento 2 versions. For example, your Magento Ajax Cart Extension can be replaced by this Magento 2 Ajax Cart Extension.
Second, if you can’t find similar plugins, let’s find some Magento module development firms and ask them to develop custom extensions for your store.
Third, the more extensions you want to keep, the more time it will take to migrate and the more money you might have to pay. Hence, instead of migrating all current extensions, you should review carefully and select the ones your site truly needs.
3. Which data do you want to migrate from the Magento 1 to Magento 2 site?
Besides fundamental databases related to your products, customers, and orders, you can also migrate product reviews, testimonials, reward points, etc…
Deciding which data you find necessary and want to migrate to the new Magento 2 site.
4. Do you know how long and how much it will take to complete your Magento 2 upgrade project?
In general, it will take 1-3 months for Magento 2 upgrade process. For example, if you choose to buy a ready-made Magento theme with minor customization, install about 10 extensions and migrate just core data (products, customers, and orders), you have to spend roughly 1 month for the migration.
In terms of website design cost, if you buy a ready-made theme, it might cost you $100-200 on average. On the other hand, you have to pay about $1,000 for a website design from the ground up.
For web development, it will cost you from $1,000 to $3,000. These price ranges are applied if you partner with a Magento development company in Asia (e.g., India, Vietnam, Singapore,…) where the labor cost is cheap. On the contrary, if you co-operate with design development firms in the US, UK, or Australia, the price might be doubled or tripled.
5. Do you want to implement Magento 2 upgrade with your internal developers or hire a Magento development company?
Although Magento 2 upgrade is not an immensely complicated process, it’s easy to get serious data loss. Owing to that, most of the Magento store owners turn to prestigious Magento e-commerce development companies to do the migration instead of “DIY”. In this way, you will avoid losing data and have more time to focus on selling.
Tigren has more than 10-year of experience in Magento e-commerce and conducted a great number of Magento 2 migration projects with proven successes. We guarantee to migrate your website smoothly from Magento 1 to 2 – with the best price on the market. Especially, we provide 6-12 months of free support after delivering your website to make sure that you are delighted with that.
Contact us to get a free quotation and consultation for your project.
Final Words
Now, Magento 2 Upgrade, or migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2, has been becoming a “must” for all Magento e-commerce websites. The reason is that Magento officially stopped supporting Magento 1 from June 2020.
Therefore, now it’s the perfect time to do the upgrade!
It goes without a doubt that there are a lot of things to conduct the Magento 2 upgrade, but hopefully, with our straightforward guide, you can make it simple.
Last but not least, if you are searching for a Magento upgrade service provider with strong expertise, experience, and reputation and offers an affordable price, Tigren is one of the best choices!
Find more about our Magento 2 migration service to know our offerings.
[ratings]
