Migrating to Magento 2: Upgrade your Store Securely

Magento 2 offers some serious upgrades from Magento 1, for which support was scheduled to end in 2020. Magento 2 represents an opportunity for e-commerce brands who are looking for a highly capable and scalable platform through which they can offer their customers a smooth online buying experience.

As such, it's no wonder that, so often companies have found themselves preparing to migrate to Magento 2, whether from their aging Magento 1 systems, or from other e-commerce solutions, such as Shopify or WooCommerce.

But how does a company ensure that their switch to Magento 2 is pulled off without a hitch? What are some vital considerations to take when migrating to Magento 2? That’s what we’re here to discuss. To better understand the numerous considerations business typically must take when switching to Magento 2, let’s explore some of them more in depth. We’ll also discuss some best practices that aim to ensure a smooth transition. Let’s dive in.

General Migration Best Practices

Whatever platform you’re migrating from, there are some general migration best practices that can be helpful to understand. Some of these include:

• Careful planning: Importantly, any large migration is going to necessitate some careful planning. This is a vital component of the larger strategy and will help you inform your approach. It can be helpful to get started with a migration roadmap, and make changes as necessary.
• Data care: before you begin a data migration, always back everything up. You never know when a transfer might go wrong, or through a fluke data is going to become corrupted. Prepare for these risks by carefully backing everything up in a third data storage space.
• Checking your stack: You might be migrating a major component of your tech stack and no others — but remember to consider if any integrations or other services are tied into the service that you’re migrating away from. Ensure that you’re able to keep the rest of your tech stack supported and that your other integrations are compatible.
• Communication with customers: If you’re planning a migration that will directly affect customers, it’s important to let them know far ahead of time. This can help you avoid unpleasant surprises.
• Compliance: When migrating to new systems, it’s significant to ensure that all compliance practices have been translated to accommodate for new systems while still ensuring legal compliance in matters such as data privacy and security.

Crucial Considerations

Now, let’s dive into some of the considerations that are likely going to be crucial as you migrate to Magento 2. Some of these may hinge on the services from which you’re pivoting, as in many cases, Magento 2 will present a different user interface, configuration options, and administrative workflow. Let’s explore.

Configuration and Setup

Magento 2 offers an extensive degree of flexibility and customization options. Magento 2 is highly configurable, and at its basic level is open-source software, meaning that developer teams can customize it extensively as an e-commerce platform. In addition to the basic open source version, Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento Commerce), a paid commercial version, offers additional features and capabilities, such as marketing and business intelligence features.

While this customizability affords users of Magento 2 a lot of freedom as far as how they want to configure and set up their Magento 2 store, it also may necessitate some advanced development and configuration tasks. As such, the move to Magento 2 may necessitate the assistance of migration experts or developers.

A Shopify to Magento migration, for example, may present a number of new considerations to take into account, such as hosting (which Magento doesn’t include by default) customization (for which Magento offers a high degree of flexibility) and integration development. However, these additional considerations can also be opportunities — representing a high degree of scalability and customizability.

Data Migration

Data migration is a crucial consideration when adopting nearly any new software solution or new component in your organization's tech stack. Data migration can be a big task, and can vary in complexity depending on factors such as which system you’re migrating to, which system you’re migrating from, the types of data that you need to migrate, and whether that data is protected under privacy or security laws.

Additionally, the manner in which data is stored, managed, and used, can differ fundamentally between platforms. For example, Shopify to Magento 2 migrations will typically involve considerations regarding the use of new data formats, careful preservation of order history and customer information, and the importation of additional data such as custom Shopify fields.

When preparing for a data migration, it will likely be important to back up all existing data in a third data storage space. This can help mitigate the risk of data corruption, or lost data through human error.  

Design and Layout

Another crucial consideration might be how you translate your shop’s theme and layout into Magento 2. If you move Shopify to Magento 2, for example, you may need to consider how you’ll translate your existing themes and layouts to Magento 2. Since these platforms rely on fundamentally different system architectures and theme building systems, you’ll need to consider how you can recreate your brand’s aesthetic appearance on Magento 2. Similarly, when moving a shop from WooCommerce to Magento, you’ll be moving from a plugin to a standalone architecture, which will likely necessitate a different approach to design.

However, since Magento 2 offers a high degree of flexibility and customizability, this can be an opportunity to further strengthen your customer experiences, and create more interactive elements, and highly customizable responsive design elements.

Search Engine Considerations

SEO, or Search Engine optimization, is an important part of an online store’s visibility. As such, when migrating to Magento 2, you’ll need to consider how the new store will be optimized for maximum visibility and engagement.

In order to do this, you’ll most likely need to consider some critical SEO factors — such as the inclusion of vital metadata (like alt text for images, meta titles on pages, and meta descriptions) the use of relevant key phrases, ease of indexing, and URL management. Since the move to Magento may have an effect on your page URLs, it will be essential to ensure that old URLs redirect to new ones and that you don’t leave any dead links behind in order to preserve existing search engine rankings.

Another consideration that’s often vital to SEO but can be overlooked is the optimization of pages. Slow loading pages can be ranked lower on search engines, so ensuring fast loading times through optimization can help assist in a larger SEO strategy.