Last updated - June 16, 2022
Running an eCommerce business in itself requires a lot of hard work. And when the CMS that you are using isn’t performing optimally, situations can become dramatically challenging.
That’s one reason why many eCommerce business owners turn to eCommerce specialist content management systems like Magento 2.
And if you too have been considering migrating your eCommerce website to this latest version of Magento, this post can be of great benefit to you.
In this post, you will learn about:
- Reasons Why Magento 2 Is a Great Choice
- What You May Need To Do Before Starting The Migration Process!
- Step-by-Step Procedure For Migration
So, let’s get started!
Why Choose Magento 2?
The magento 1 expires in June 2020 and thus migrating your eCommerce website to Magento 2 is a given. And if you are wondering what are the upgrades that are available with Magento 2, we’ve listed them down for you in this section.
1. Reduces the Load On The Server
On most of the days, eCommerce websites are generally loaded with lots of data that can often put a heavy load on the server.
As a result, the website’s performance deteriorates, making it slow and difficult to load up.
This worsens the overall user experience, also pulling down the search rankings.
And that’s where Magento 2 can come as a life-saver. Page loading speed for eCommerce websites built with Magento 2 are faster than ever as the new Magento has focused on:
- Introducing an Ajax cart
- Implementing PHP 7 in its code (it’s optimized for speed)
- Varnish cache and HTTP accelerator
- Optimizing the hosting environment
2. Easy Checkout Process
No eCommerce business owner likes to see high cart abandonment rates.
But, as some content management systems make the checkout process elongated, many potential buyers drop or stall their purchase decision. As a result, fewer items are sold.
All thanks to the easy and quick checkout process that Magento 2 offers its users. This is one great reason why you must be using it.
3. Better Indexing/Search Response
One common issue with many CMS-based eCommerce stores is that they take forever to make a search query.
For example, if a visitor does a search related to a product, the website may take too long before presenting the related search results.
This can often be frustrating for prospects and visitors.
Magento 2 eliminates such issues with an improved toolkit that offers:
- Efficient backend operation
- Optimized web pages
- More server response time for all activities
- Enhanced database flexibility to handle peak loads
What You May Need To Do Before Starting The Migration Process!
So, coming to the next part, let us talk about what you must do while you prepare for migrating your website to Magento 2.
Review Extensions On Your Current Site
This is going to be quick and straightforward.
What you need to do is take a look at all the extensions that you are using on your current website. Then check whether you are going to need these extensions after you have moved to Magento 2. And then, see if those extensions are available for Magento 2.
Build and Prepare Your New Store For Migration
Once you have sorted out the extensions, it’s time to build and prepare your new Magento 2 store for migration.
For this, you’ll need to set up a Magento 2 hardware system that somewhat matches your current system.
After this, install Magento 2 with all of its modules and the Data Migration Tool on a system that is powerful enough to run Magento 2.
To download the Data Migration Tool, you can go to:
Step-by-Step Procedure For Migrating Your eCommerce Website To Magento 2
Moving to the next section, here are the steps that you need to follow for successfully migrating your eCommerce website to Magento 2.
Step 1: After Building and Preparing, Give a Dry Run
In the previous section, we had built and prepared our new store for migration. This is the time to give it a dry run.
It’s important before starting the migration process, so you can identify any problems with the installation.
Follow these steps for this migration test:
- Copy your old store to a staging server
- Fully migrate the replicated old store to Magento 2
- Test your new store for all types of issues that can be there
Step 2: Start The Migration Process
Here are the sub-steps for the migration process.
- Keep a check on the Data Migration Tool. It must have network access so it can connect to both Magento 1 and Magento 2 databases. After this, open the corresponding ports in your farewell.
- End all activities in the older Admin Panel. Just keep order management activities like shipping, creating invoice, credit memos running. (Don’t turn on any of these activities until the final store is set up).
- Stop all of the old Magento (1.x) cron jobs. Or at least ensure that they don’t create new database entities
- Use the Data Migration Tool to migrate settings and your website.
- Copy your Magento 1.x media files to Magento 2.x. Remember to copy these files manually from magento1-root/media directory to magento2-root/pub/media.
- If the extensions have a different structure in Magento 2 database, use the mapping files that came with the Data Migration Tool.
- After everything is done, it’s time for you to reindex all Magento 2.x indexers.
Step 3: See If Any Changes Are Required In The Migrated Data
If you want your new Magento 2 store to have different catalog designs, structures, sales rules, or CMS pages than earlier, this is the time to make those changes.
If you don’t want to fix something here and break something there, be cautious while making these manual changes.
Every mistake that you make can give rise to several other errors, which may be trickier to resolve.
Step 4: Check For Remaining Incremental Updates
Once you have migrated the data, it’s time to incrementally capture data updates that might have taken place in the Magento 1 version of your site, but are yet to be migrated to the new version.
For this, you will have to use the Delta Mode.
Just start the incremental migration, and the updates will happen on their own. If you may need to stop the migration, you can do that by pressing Ctrl+C.
This shortcut will be helpful when you want to stop the migration for fixing an error that you just found out about.
Step 5: Final Touches
And here comes the time to make your new website live. Just keep the following pointers in mind.
- Put the old Magento version in maintenance mode
- Stop the incremental migration process ( Ctrl+C )
- Initiate the Magento 2 cron jobs
- Reindex the stock indexer
- Perform the final verification of your new Magento 2 store
- Update domain name system (DNS) and load balancers
- And your eCommerce store is now Live on Magento 2
Important Note: If you don’t have a developer who is well versed with Magento, make sure you get in touch with a qualified web development service that can smoothly and swiftly migrate your eCommerce website to Magento 2.
This is a delicate process and may not best suit a novice.
Final words
Successfully Migrating your eCommerce store to Magento 2 can be a challenging task. And if any failures occur, they can also harm your overall business.
That’s why it’s essential to be mindful of your actions and the steps that you are following for migration. In this post, we discussed the same with our readers.
Hopefully, this was helpful.
