If you’re using Magento Commerce as the backbone of your online store, you might have heard that the older versions of the platform are no longer supported as of June 30, 2020. If you haven’t heard, you might have seen a scary warning message within your website dashboard about the “end of life for Magento 1.” Magento Commerce announced that they would discontinue Magento 1 way back in 2018, but if you still haven’t had the chance to switch, you’ve missed the deadline. Now what?
What Is Magento Commerce 2?
Magento Commerce is one of the most popular eCommerce platforms used by online stores around the world, and it’s lauded most for its flexibility and expandability. Unlike other eCommerce platforms, there’s very little about Magento that can’t be tweaked and molded to suit your business’s needs and brand. According to an Alexa study, Magento is used on 20 percent of all eCommerce sites online (eCommerce Platforms).
Magento Commerce was built for people of varying levels of technical skill. Although you can hire a developer to create a completely custom experience for your shoppers using the platform, it also has beginners in mind, allowing you to create designs with a drag and drop builder.
Just a few of the awesome features included in Magento Commerce include:
- SEO tools
- Staging
- Marketing, promotions, conversions
- Product browsing
- Order management
- Customer service
- Store credits
- Gift registries
- And so much more!
Magento Commerce is our number one recommendation for eCommerce platforms if you’re looking to grow your online store to the next level because the features are nearly limitless. Even if you don’t need it now, as your business continues to grow, you’ll eventually run into the need to custom build something. That’s also when you’ll likely wish you had chosen Magento Commerce.
Again, we use multiple platforms for our clients depending on their company’s size and their specific needs, but if you’re looking for continued scalability, you might want to deeply consider Magento.
What Happens If You Still Haven’t Migrated from Magento 1?
Okay, okay, so this article is all about migrating from Magento 1—may it rest in peace—and shifting your platform to Magento Commerce 2.1. If you haven’t had the chance to do that before June, 2020, you might be wondering what that means for your current online store. Now that Magento 1 is dead, that doesn’t mean your current website is going to self-destruct, but it also doesn’t mean it will keep running as normal.
What Happens to Your Site If You Stay on Magento 1?
- Magento will no longer support the EOL (End-Of-Life) platform, therefore, you won’t receive any further support or updates that might be crucial to the security and functionality of your online store.
- You might find that Magento 1 is no longer functioning with newer versions of your host server’s scripting language, which could ultimately cause site glitches and problems with further customizations.
- Failure to migrate to a new system leaves you and your customers at risk of security breaches because the platform can no longer accept new security updates that keep pass-through information encrypted on the platform. Without Magento regularly scanning the dead platform for security vulnerabilities, you’re risking a lot by not migrating.
If you still haven’t had a chance to migrate your online store from Magento 1, it’s highly recommended that you do so immediately. While your store won’t crumble to pieces tomorrow, you will soon experience problems that will wreak havoc on your customers’ experiences. You’ll also open yourself up to a potential data breach that could cause your customers to lose trust in your company.
How Do You Migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2?
1. How Hard is it to Migrate?
We’ll be honest and let you know that the migration process is not the easiest. While both platforms are similar in many ways, Magento 2 has a completely different database design and architecture. The time it takes to complete the migration process all depends on how well you’ll be able to navigate this new platform design, plus the level of complexity of your current store setup. You’ll need to take into account the extensions your store is running, and the customizations you have in place, etc.
2. What Data Needs to Migrate?
You’ll want to migrate all your product data, customer data, and analytics data with you during the migration. You’ll also want to keep configuration settings and any other incremental data updates to the storefront and admin panel.
Depending on the size of your store and how much information you have loaded into it, this can be overwhelming and scary. We always highly recommend that your entire store and website have a very recent backup stored somewhere safe whenever you make any changes to your site.
Magento created a sweet tool to help its users with importing product and customer data to the new 2.0 version of their platform: Magento 2 Data Migration Tool. We highly recommend checking out this tool to help during the migration process!
3. Transferring Media from Magento 1 to Magento 2
Transferring media like images and videos will require a different process then migrating the data. This will need to happen manually by crawling into your database and grabbing the folder where these files are stored.
There are four kinds of data that need to be migrated manually:
- Media
- Storefront design
- Admin user accounts
- Access Control Lists (ACLs)
If you’re not a professional developer with experience navigating database files, we highly recommend working with someone who is. One wrong move in your database during this migration and you might cause serious problems on your website.
[Contact us to start your Magento 1 migration here]
4. Migrating Extensions and Customizations
Remember that you’re migrating to Magento 2 for a reason and that’s because it’s new and improved. You’ll notice that much of what you’re used to with Magento 1, like certain extensions and custom code, won’t carry over to Magento 2. You’ll need an experienced web developer to help you re-create some of these elements so that they work properly with the Magento 2 structure. You can check out this awesome Code Migration Toolkit to give you some insight into what will carry over and what won’t.
Conclusion
Remember that your online store is quite often the primary source of income for your business, especially if you don’t have a brick and mortar location. You can’t afford to have issues with performance or to experience any pause in transactions during the migration process.
Don’t leave your Magento 2 migration to someone who doesn’t have the experience and knowledge to do it successfully and without hiccups. We highly recommend reaching out to an experienced Magento web developer who can make this migration happen in a timely and seamless manner.
If you need help with your migration, feel free to reach out to us!
