Magento Migration in 4 steps

There are 4 steps and suggestions on how to migrate Magento 1 to Magento 2

Most of the businesses which still have their e-commerce on the Magento 1 platform think about migration to Magento 2. Officially Magento 1 was supported by Adobe till the end of June 2020. If you run a Magento 1 store, it’s high time for recognition in Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration process.

The question is: How to start the migration process? Or rather what to think about in a first way when planning the migration of Magento store? More suggestions and advantages you will find here.

Assuming you have already made a decision on M1 to M2 migration. Let’s analyze the beginning situation.

The first question on the Magento migration process

When we ask our clients who are the eCommerce owners, they usually say that from a merchant’s point of view, it’s simple: “We want to have the same functionalities in Magento 2 as we have now in Magento 1.”

Our first suggestion, in this case, is to look through and audit the Magento 1 store functionalities and then decide what data to migrate and what to modify in the Magento 2 upgrade. The audit may reveal that it’s a good time to add new functionalities or change the project’s design?

The complexity of the Magento migration process depends on the software customization. Nevertheless, there are 4 main stages you should be aware of.

 1. Functionality analysis on Magento 1

In our opinion, at the beginning of the migration process, we should focus on the functionalities that we have on the frontend and on the admin panel.

• By the frontend, we mean all functionalities which are available for final customers.
• By the admin panel, we understand all functionalities which are used by merchants, service desk team.

We should check which functionalities are necessary and used on a daily basis. This analysis should be done by the shop owner and technical staff/agency separately. 

After that, conclusions from both analyzes should be combined and discussed. It will give us 80-90% of functionalities which are must-haves in the shop. Missing 10-20% of must-have functionalities will be defined in the first iterations of the project.

After the main analysis, we will see that 60-70% of all shop’s functionalities are necessary functionalities. While the rest of them are unused functionalities or functionalities which didn’t bring any value to your shop and we suggest not migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

2. Extensions and modules in Magento 1 store

The next step is to connect each extension with particular functionality. That will give us a list of modules that should be migrated to Magento 2. The list consists of two parts:

1. One part of this list contains modules that are available on Magento 1 and also available on Magento 2. 
2. The second part of the list contains custom-created modules and modules which haven’t been rewritten to Magento 2. In this case, we have two options:

• leave this functionality and not migrate it to Magento 2,
• rewrite custom module to Magento 2.

 3. Data migration from Magento 1

Magento 1 database structure is similar to Magento 2 database structure. It’s a good idea to migrate Products, Categories, Customers, CMS Pages. This would be easy, but in most cases, shops are customized which comes down to expand M2 existing tables or create new and map data from M1 to M2.

To accomplish this process we need a Magento 2 data migration tool and we can easily use the official Data Migration Tool from Magento (https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/migration/migration-tool.html) or custom extension like Improved Import & Export Tool for Magento (https://firebearstudio.com/the-improved-import.html).

4. Design, theme in an upgraded Magento 2 version

The frontend parts in Magento 1 and Magento 2 are different. It’s necessary to rewrite or recreate themes. 

If you want to improve the frontend part you should consider using Progressive Web Application (PWA) solution for Magento 2.

Adobe works on the official solution – PWA Studio (https://magento.github.io/pwa-studio/).

We started using ScandiPWA Theme for Magento (https://scandipwa.com/).

Using the PWA solution we will improve customer experience in the shop and it will increase sales. 

From our perspective migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2 looks like creating a new project from scratch. We can’t copy files from Magento 1 to Magento 2 – it will not work.

An alternative to PWA is becoming Hyva which doesn’t use JavaScript and so can be lighter and faster. There are followers of PWA and Hyva and both solutions have advantages and can bring a new quality of customer experience to the Magento 2 store.

Conclusion

The biggest advantage is a situation where we have all the requirements which work well on Magento 1 platform and we can migrate them to Magento 2. We do not have to reinvent a wheel from the beginning. But as we know nothing is perfect and improvement is a common and wanted situation in e-commerce stores.

We will assist with pleasure in your Magento 2 migration journey! 🙂

• Here you can find the history of successful migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2 of one of our Clients.
• If you still wonder if it’s worth migrating in your individual situation you may need to read this article.