With Adobe’s announcement that it will discontinue support for site’s running on Magento 1 after June 2020, many e-commerce site owners are now finally planning to migrate to Magento 2. If you happen to be one of them, then I am sure you have questions in your mind regarding how best to proceed with this migration process. In this article, I will walk you through the best practices of Magento 2 migration for you to follow so that you can successfully migrate your site without losing any traffic or functionality.
The entire migration process can be divided into three phases or stages. These stages are given below:
Pre-migration stage
This stage involves all the activities needed to be completed before the migration stage is started. These activities include – reviewing the entire data of the site, taking backups of all important files, charting a plan for each phase as well as setting deadlines for each stage. Noting down any design specifications that need to be changed. In short, creating an entire action plan.
Migration stage
This is the stage where migration actually takes place. For testing purposes, the Magento 2 site is set up on a new server after which, all the data including extensions, files, content, design themes, plugins, etc are imported into the new server. Then the site is kept in maintenance mode while all functionalities are tested.
Post-migration stage
In this stage, a complete synchronization is done with your old version’s customer and order history. This ensures that continuity is maintained and no data is lost due to migration of the website.
Migrating the site to Magento 2 is not a simple task. It can be time-consuming and can take anywhere from three to six months if you do not face any additional challenges. Let us check out what some of the most common challenges are that occur during migration.
SEO Performance Can Take a Hit
Whenever a site is migrated from an older version to a new one or from one e-commerce platform to another, there is always a risk of losing your SEO performance. This is due to several issues that arise like broken links, redirections not working properly, missing pages and more. This can result in a decrease in organic traffic as well as keyword ranking of certain pages falling.
Although Magento 2 has many advanced features that help SEO, these above-mentioned issues can throw a monkey wrench into your online marketing strategies. In this situation, you can refer to the crawl error report in Google Search Console to know what all issues are present and go about fixing them. Another good tool is Screaming Frog SEO Spider.
Issues with Data Migration
Migrating all that data from version 1 to version 2 is no piece of cake. There can be issues with this mass data migration that can cause issues for your Magento 2 site. This data includes previous order history, customer database, content, themes, title and meta tags of pages as well as product images. You will need the help of a Magento development company with expertise in Magento migration for this process to go smoothly.
Always remember that if you do not possess technical knowledge for this migration, it is better to hire professionals as its a lot more complicated than it seems.
Problems Caused By Bad Data Structure
If the data structure and the code in your version 1 site were messy and improper, then this will cause issues during migration as normal migration scripts may not work properly. This could lead to a lot of customized development to be carried out during the migration stage, which will push the migration timeline ever further.
In the worst-case scenario, you may have to reinstall version 1 and then fix the structure issue there and then migrate the site to version 2 again. A proper Magneto code review is needed before the migration process in order to avoid this problem later on.
How do you know that your site migration is completed? When do you know that the mission has been successfully completed? You set a goal, that is how. You need to have an endgame in mind before you start the Magento 2 migration. You need to have a checklist of things that need to be accomplished before you can safely state that the site migration has been done properly.
Make a list and set a timeline for the same. Measure your actual accomplishments with this timeline and checklist. Only when all the items are completed can you say that the migration project is finished.
I hope that the best practices shared by me today in this post will be helpful to all e-commerce store owners in migrating their site to Magento 2 successfully. In case you face any issues, you can contact Clap Creative for guidance. Clap Creative has a track record of successfully migrating several of our clients’ sites to Magento 2 without any hassle.
A seasoned technology writer and marketing consultant with over a decade of experience helping businesses grow online. I specialize in content marketing, SEO, web design, and e-commerce development. I am enthusiastic about using cutting-edge technology to acquire high-quality traffic, generate leads, and increase sales for my clients.
