The end of Magento 1 is near, the deadline to transition from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is June of 2020 to be exact, have you thought about your plan for making the upgrade? Establishing a transition plan and selecting a Magento expert to upgrade your software will be crucial for a smooth and easy migration. See the benefits of Magento 2 and how you can streamline your transition for better performance, increased revenue growth and long-term success below.
Why Does My Website Need to Migrate to Magento 2?
With Magento's announcement about Magento 1, the company will no longer support the software after June 2020. That means there will no longer be updates made to this platform. If you decide not to update to Magento 2, any issues that might arise on your Magento 1 site may be harder to fix, and security patches will end, potentially making your site non-compliant, which can lead to data breaches and hacks. In addition, it may also be increasingly difficult to find third-party experts who can help solve these problems for your business as the focus will now be Magento 2 and beyond.
With Magento 2, your business will have a better customization framework, more intuitive checkout workflows and an easier to use admin interface. Overall, the experience on Magento 2 will be easier for both your developers and admins to use. The Magento 2 platform is a streamlined and optimized version that will boost your e-commerce performance and provide a better overall experience. One study found that customers who have already transitioned their sites to Magento 2 are seeing a cost savings of 62% when deploying new content such as landing pages and new product pages.
What Will Migrating to Magento 2 Consist Of?
The transition itself may take time depending on the current complexities of your website and its customizations. For less complex projects, we’d still recommend giving yourself anywhere between 2-3 months to ensure a complete migration.
Once your development team dives into the transition, there will be a minimum of four components they’ll focus on: data, extensions, themes, and customizations. Magento created numerous guides and tools to help with the migration, but your development teams will ultimately have to work through each of these components to ensure your future success.
When it comes to data, porting over all of your configurations, product, category, CMS content, and media data is critical and will take time. This is an important aspect of the transition as your teams will want to make sure everything gets carried over from your Magento 1 site. For extensions, your developers will review the extensions you had on Magento 1 and will install them on your Magento 2 site. Extensions can provide much of your website’s functionality, so ensuring that all the necessary extensions are up and running before your new site launch will be important. From there, your team will migrate your visual theme over to your Magento 2 site. Magento 2 incorporates new approaches and technologies that allow your new site to provide more innovative shopping experiences for your customers. You’ll want to ask yourself if your existing theme still makes sense or if there is a new theme you should take advantage of for improved performance? Spend some time researching themes so your new site provides the best customer experience possible at peak performance. Once you’ve chosen a theme, your development team will work through any final site customizations. Did you have custom code on your Magento 1 website? If so, your team will work on pulling this functionality over to your upgraded site or they’ll find an extension that will bring this functionality to life.
Partner with a Certified Magento Expert for a Smooth Transition
The transition from Magento 1 to Magento 2 will most likely be a complex one because of the way your initial site was built. Because of this, we recommend partnering with an experienced, Magento-certified team who can help you with a smooth upgrade. Your site was built with customizations to meet your users’ needs, and now those customizations need to be replicated or updated onto a new site. By partnering with Magento experts, they’ll be able to walk you through the process, find those customizations and match them on your new site with confidence. You’ll probably run into workarounds and quick fixes to get around the Magento 2 upgrade, but we don’t recommend reading into them- they’ll most likely cost you more time and money in the long run.
Get your Magento e-commerce firing on all cylinders. Speak with our Magento-certified developers today.