5 Steps For Smooth Migration To Magento 2

Are you planning to migrate your eCommerce store from Magento 1 to Magento 2? If yes, many congratulations for the same. A large number of store merchants have already upgraded their store to Magento 2, and many new functionalities are being custom made for Magento 2 which are not compatible with the previous version.

Well, planning Magento 2 migration is a great idea, but for right execution, you may need the help of an expert. Here are 5 steps that can make your Magento migration journey smooth and pain-free.

1. Review Extensions

There are hundreds of thousands of Magento extensions available in the Magento Marketplace and you might be using plenty of them to ease your store operations. Right? In fact, most of the merchants use Magento extensions, since they are quite useful and make their storefront look professional and work more efficiently.

When you are upgrading your Magento store, you need to review all your installed extensions and figure out which extensions you still need in the latest iteration and which ones you can do away with, especially considering the fact that having multiple extensions installed in your eCommerce store can slow down its speed and performance significantly.

Once you’ve decided which extensions you need in the latest version, you have to check if they have been developed for Magento 2 and if not, you can go for custom extension development. Since Magento was launched back in 2014 and you’re upgrading now, you will easily find almost every extension that you were using in Magento 1.

2. Magento 2 Building and Testing

This is another important step. It involves different stages and components, the most significant one is the installation of Magento 2 and then creating an eCommerce store that will look and feel like your existing store in terms of design and user experience. Also, don’t forget to perform extensive testing in this step.

3. Start the Migration

Before you avail Magento upgrade services and start the migration, it's recommended to stop all the activities on your Magento store, except for order management. You can also pause cron jobs as well.

When migrating data of your store, it’s suggested to do it from a replicated Magento 1 database. Once you complete all your reindexing, you will have to perform more testing before making your store live.

4. Update Incremental Data

In this step, you have to capture all data updates like customer reviews, new orders, etc., and move them to your new Magento 2 store.

5. Going Live

After a brief hiatus, which according to Magento should not be more than a few minutes, you can make your store go live. The downtime is required to adjust your DNS settings and complete the reindexing process. When both of them are done, you can go live.

Wrapping Up

Upgrading your eCommerce store to Magento 2 is not that scary. To make the transition smooth, pleasant and bump-free, we’ve covered the 5 steps in this article. Make sure you follow them while migrating your eCommerce store.

Vachel Ladd is an experienced Sr. Magento developer, associated with Magnomates. He loves to share his in-depth knowledge on Magento through writing articles, blogs, case studies.