How to migrate Magento 1 to Magento 2

To migrate or not to migrate? This question has undoubtedly played in mind since Magento 2 came along.

These days, Magento 2 is conquering the market, and business owners are gradually migrating their stores to the new version in order to gain more benefits.

Don't forget that Magento 1 support will be discontinued in June 2020 and after this date, there won’t be any new updates to Magento 1.

How will it influence Magento 1 online stores? They won’t only have slow performance and out-of-date functionality, but also – more importantly – they won’t be secure. The possibility of being hit by malicious software will increase.

Don't forget that the migration of an average website takes one month minimum. But if your website is heavy and complex, you should have up to 6 months on deck.

Migration to the new Magento version is not a simple upgrade between Magento 1.8 and 1.9, but a completely new approach to online business and a totally another CMS system.

In comparison with Magento 1, Magento’s next version is more optimized. Built with the latest Google Search patches and requirements, with SEO trends in mind, the platform gives your online store more visibility on the Internet. Magento 2 provides improvements that mean appearing higher in search engine results.

With enhanced ability to create custom meta tags for your products, the well-designed Magento 2 Rich Snippets extension will help your site rank higher in Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Besides, Magento 2 has an optimized checkout process. It is simple and easy to navigate for website users.

Compared to Magento 1, which sees extension implementation take forever, even for experienced developers, integrating modules with Magento 2 requires less time and funds. Two or more extensions for Magento 1 can mean a breakdown in the event they conflict with each other when they cross in functionality. This means development teams have to search for the reason and then solve the problem manually, which can be quite time-consuming. In Magento 2, the situation is vastly different.

Thanks to the search and analytics engine supported by Magento 2, Elasticsearch, search quality and user experience have been enhanced.

Thanks to the intuitive navigation through the admin panel, the product upload process is easy and painless. Plus, Magento 2 allows you to upload not only product images, but videos as well. Magento 1 only allows uploading images, which of course limits the e-commerce store’s power because customers consequently have only one way to interact with the product virtually.

The Magento 2 admin panel looks modern and truly pleasing to the eye. It was developed taking into account all the latest UI/UX design trends. Well-structured and intuitive, the panel allows users to efficiently navigate the system and quickly find whatever data that may be required, such as bestsellers, recent customers, top searched items, average orders, and more.

With our experience in Magento development, we’re ready to share meaningful insights about it.

In this article you will find out more about Magento development and how to migrate Magento 1 to Magento 2.

I work at Whidegroup, an e-commerce development company, which specializes in providing feature-rich e-commerce solutions in web development, UI/UX and consulting.