Magento 2 Migration: Is it Worth The Effort?
Table of contents
- 1. What's Magento 2?
- 2. Magento 1 vs. Magento 2: What are Magento 2's benefits?
- Improved performance
- Streamlined checkout process
- Better admin interface
- Mobile friendly
- 3. Is migration to Magento 2 compulsory?
- 4. Major obstacles in migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2
- Data migration issues
- Image migration issues
- Custom extension issues
- Theme and template issues
Magento has around 9 percent of the world’s e-commerce sites — and many of these users are at a crossroads: do we have to move to Magento 2 or explore other ecommerce platform again? After the purchase of Magento by Adobe for $1.68 billion, a lot has been addressed about how this deal could transform the whole eCommerce environment. Of course, we can see that Magento now uses Adobe’s cloud technologies and design tools to create a lot of potential. Nevertheless, Magento is an independent eCommerce platform at this time of writing.
And while Magento 2 is far superior to its predecessor, Magento 1’s migration process is complicated and can lead to hair-pulling frustration.
1. What’s Magento 2 ?
Magento 2 Open Source
Magento 2 Business Version
Business Cloud Version
Most eCommerce brands tend to choose the Open Source version because of the price. Only 9 percent of Magento 2 users use the Enterprise Edition based on recent data from BuiltWith.
2. Magento 1 vs. Magento 2: What are Magento 2’s benefits?
Improved performance
Streamlined checkout process
Better admin interface
Mobile friendly
While we can see the benefits of Magento’s latest incarnation, the harsh reality is that transitioning from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is a time-consuming and challenging task. This raises the question:
3. Is migration to Magento 2 compulsory?
Since November 2015, Magento 2 has been available. But according to Salmon, Magento 1 is still being used by many companies — but it won’t be much longer.
That’s because Magento announced back in February 2017 that support for Magento 1 would end in November 2018. This has, though, been expanded recently to June 2020 as long as permits have been renewed to comply with that year.
Nonetheless, the days of Magento 1 are counted.
4. Major obstacles in migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2
If you are contemplating moving to Magento 2, there are some things that need to be addressed once you make the move — and before you can upgrade to Magento 3 in a couple of years. Here are the biggest problems to be worried about.
Data migration issues
Image migration issues
Custom extension issues
Theme and template issues
Migration to Magento 2 is “20 percent larger” than the average Magento 1.x upgrade, according to the Magento migration overview — and this does not take into account the above issues. All of these things mean that you, as a Magento 2 client, will be left operating in their live environments on Magento 1, whilst restoring everything on a production database in Magento 2 until these problems were ironed out, which could take months. And, worse yet, they may be unfixable problems that may contribute to the restoration of custom plugins or the destruction of your website model.