Currently, Magento is the most popular eCommerce platform with more than 250,000 merchants across the globe. Magento 2 was under development since 2010, and it was released back in 2015. It took five years to develop, which is quite a long term in modern IT world. But the five years development efforts brought quite significant changes in Magento 2 when compared with Magento 1. It is pretty much different system – from both technical and business senses. That’s the main reason that leads you to the idea of Magento 2 migration.

Advantages of Magento 2 

1-Improved UX and UI Features
2-Streamlined checkout
3-Trendy built-in Technologies
4-Performance Enhancement
5-Framework Improvements
6-Quality extensions for Magento 2
7-Quarterly platform updates

From greater performance to improved upgrades, Magento 2 offers the ecommerce community a deal not to ignore. But what is the process of this epic migration? 

Here’s a handy flowchart from Magento which shows how the Migration plan works:

No doubt, the migration process might not run exactly as you want, you will face some issues to solve. Here are some important considerations to keep in mind which will help you fluently migrate to Magento 2:

5 Important Things to consider when migrating to Magento 2

1. Magento 2 Migration Difficulty

According to Magento’s estimation, Magento 2 migration is 20% larger than Magento 1 upgrade, and it is not the easy process. As it has a completely different architecture and database design, it may take a lot of time and efforts to move to Magento 2. Migration time and resources actually depends on the complexity, number of customizations, and the number of extensions running on the store.

2. Importing Media Files

Migrating media files such as images must be done differently than product data. Media data will need to be migrated manually.

3. Importing Product and Customer Data

One of the enhanced feature in the new version is a handy Magento 2 Data Migration Tool which assists in importing product and customer data to the new 2.0 version. This tool uses map files to transform data to your Magento store. It verifies the consistent data between Magento 1 and 2 database structures, creates logs, tracks the data transfer progress, and runs data verification tests.

It basically works in three ways:

i.Migrating configuration settings
ii.Migrating main data in the database
iii.Transferring incremental data updates to the storefront and admin panel

4. Migrating Extensions and Theme

Magento 1 extensions are probably not compatible with Magento 2. The Code Migration Toolkit can assist with migrating some extensions and custom code, but not all. Both Magento 1 extensions and themes must be re-created to work properly with the new Magento 2 structure.

5. Performance Considerations

It is possible that migration, despite planning, may not work perfectly. You may see error messages. Don’t fret! The process is not always perfect and any errors can be fixed by reaching out to knowledgeable Magento developers.

Conclusion

It makes sense to switch to Magento 2 if you want to keep up with innovation in ecommerce. Although it can be a tedious process, it can be made easier by planning every step in detail and sticking to a migration plan.