When it comes to digital commerce, the competitive stakes are high:
a). Over 11% of retail shopping happens online.
b). Almost 40% of all business nowadays is taken into consideration by mobile devices and even more than 50% online retail product search is also done through this.
c). 68% of B2B clients want to research and order online vs utilizing deals like a sales rep.
And the potential of having such sales in 2020 is also getting huge. So with such great opportunities and high results, eCommerce services need some upgrades for better scalability, performance, and best results. You might be questioning yourself about the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration and how will you manage such a tedious task. But let us share you some key benefits of Magento 2 platform which might prevail over any challenges you think about migration:
1. Better shopping experience with advance custom features
2. Web pages loading process gets faster
3. Smooth and efficient checkout
4. Easy and instant search
5. B2B features
In today’s competitive eCommerce market, the best way to winning clients is to convey them a unique, user-friendly, and engaging experience across each touchpoint by making it a simple transaction to complete.
Top Reasons to Move to Magento 2:
a). As stated above Magento 2 provides a personalized shopping experience for customers and it helps in getting more sales and return purchases.
b). Enhancing the performance speed and database scalability.
c). The advance search feature displays instant results as targeted.
d). Streamlined checkout not only helps in reducing cart abandonment or checkout time but also boosts the website conversion rate.
e). Mobile-friendly and Responsive design ensures that customers have the best checkout experience.
f). User friendly and excellent admin interface for store admins to manage tasks easily.
g). Another best feature is to Registration with one-click at the time of checkout or placing an order. This will engage more customers.
h). With user-friendly backend features, the management time gets saved and even store admin needs not to rely on developers more.
i). Overall website performance gets improved because of the full-page caching feature as it loads the pages in 1-2 seconds.
j). Rich content features that help in growing business more.
It’s officially stated that Magento 1 support is ending in June 2020. So migrating to Magento 2 is now the key requirement for you to keep your website secure, updated and safe.
Before you start, below list needs to be sorted:
a). Plan your migration:
Before starting the migration process, you must determine your ideal time for launch. It may seem like a minor detail but to avoid any critical issue or delay later you must plan your migration launch timeline. Generally, it takes 3-6 months for migration depending on your store functionalities, extensions, 3rd party integrations, etc to complete the migration process and launch it live.
b). Migration Cost:
Magento 2 is a new brand platform and you will have to invest some fair amount to have better results. The cost of Magento 2 Migration Services depends on many aspects like redesigning, customization, extensions, etc.
Steps to migrate to Magento 2:
1. Current Theme Review
2. Review Custom Code and your Extensions.
3. Review any 3rd Party Integrations
4. Data Migration
5. QA and Launch
Current Theme Review
Don’t rush on migrating to Magento 2 platform directly. Take your time to evaluate your current website, current theme, functionalities, etc. To improve performance and to personalize the buying experience you need to rebuild the website with a new theme or else need to do the necessary customizations in the current theme.
For better customer experience make sure that your selected theme must be responsive. To avoid unwanted hassles, you can buy Magento 2 themes by own and install them. Some themes included in Magento are listed below:
a). Porto Theme
b). Ultimo Theme
c). Shopper Theme
d). Fastest Theme
e). Instagram Theme
f). Minimalism Theme
g). Rope Responsive Theme
h). Couture Fashion Responsive Theme
i). Modern Print Store Theme
In this stage, you can also evaluate a few more things like:
1. What features are never used or maybe confusing to my customers?
2. Where customers are getting dropped in the sales pipeline?
3. Track customers searching for what products?
4. What things and details customers are looking for in the product detail page?
5. What filters are they using to sort the product list?
6. What is your unique selling point and how you are using it to get better results?
7. What did you feel about your store?
8. What you wish to get modified further?
9. Any additional features required or not?
10. Track the highest entry page and also try to decrease the bounce rate.
Review Custom Code and your Extensions
So after theme review, take time to evaluate extensions and review the custom code. Review that:
a). Which extensions are you using?
b). Which one is outdated and needs upgrading?
c). Which one is not required now?
d). Which is affecting your website performance?
During the Magento 2 migration process, our team will also help to recognize the extensions that need to be updated. But we suggest installing only the Magento 2 Extensions that are needed for your business as it will simplify the future upgrades. Magento 2 upgrade services help to enhance the store features and functionalities.
As it is obvious that the Magento 2 is an upgraded version of Magento 1 so it is expected that the Magento 1 custom code will almost be compatible with Magento 2. Additionally, coding may be required as Magento 2’s platform is structurally different from Magento 1. So this is the key task to make sure that the integrated custom code runs perfectly with your Magento 2 platform. Even our Magento champions and the certified developers help you out to check the compatibility of your custom code and let you know if any additional required.
Review any 3rd Party Integrations
It’s very crucial to identify the 3rd party integrations to your website as a point of sales, payment gateway, order management system, enterprise resource planning, etc because all these include the important data of your store and need proper integration for the better performance of your website.
Let us share with you that integration is key to a user-friendly store website as well as efficient and control over backend operations. So take your time to list out the 3rd party integrations that accounted for your website with your developer or agency team. Because if any of the important 3rd party systems are ignored or overlooked, it may affect your customer experience.
Data Migration
The key step of migration is to move your data from Magento 1 including everything like orders, customers, CMS pages, categories, etc. to Magento 2. Such a migration process is not that easy task, there are multiple steps to process this migration. A huge amount of data needs to be inputted and mapped. And to ensure the smooth transition we need to perform an intense testing process also. First, the unused and unnecessary data will be cleaned up and then only the final migration process starts.
Migration includes
a). Customer migration
b). Orders Migration
c). Catalog Migration
d). CMS Migration
QA and launch
Last but not the least step is to test the overall website and identify the mistakes & defects in the migrated site:
a). Internal Testing:
When your migration is completed, a final QA is done across the entire site. To check that website look the same everywhere and is compatible with all browsers, our team will test your website with all the majorly used browsers.
b). Testing on multiple devices:
This quality assurance is to check the compatibility with all the currently used devices and ensure that your site works smoothly with them.
c). Client Testing:
The main objective is client satisfaction and approval so before launching the site you can also check the whole website. For this, you will get the required time to go through your fully functional website and confirm that it is as per your requirement or not.
d). Sign off with approval:
We will choose a launch date with the client’s approval.
e). Go live:
So this final step of going live includes the meeting where you and dedicated team will be connected so that you got complete details on every single step of the launching process.
So, I hope after going through the detailed guide now you are ready to move on to Magento 2. Looking for any help or in case any query regarding Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration, you can contact our certified Magento developers anytime and ask for the help. They will not only help you out but also ensure the migration of your existing eCommerce store from version 1 to 2 of Magento goes perfect without any hassle.
For any kind of consultation, get in touch with agents Magento specialists.
