Migration to Magento 2 – A complete guide

Magento has released a new flagship version of its services and is claimed to be significant revamp in the performance of all eCommerce stores that are using Magento as their service provider. 

According to the official Magento blog, they announced they would be discontinuing the support for Magento 1 from June 2020. There are high odds that the majority of the themes and extensions in the marketplace will comprise solutions that will only support Magento 2 applications.

We will provide you with an essential step by step guide to migrate your existing Magento 1 application (your eCommerce store) to the Magento 2 version.

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Advantages of Magento 2 migration

There are some of the most important benefits of Magento 2 migration:

• Improved performance and scalability

Magento 2 has increased performance and scalability because it enhances web pages for quicker delivery, improves server response times for all site tasks, enhances proficiency of backend operations, and enhances database flexibility and scalability to deal with complexity.

• Enhanced security

Magento 2 has put a prime focus on security, and subsequently, has more safe data handling. With its main focus on securing consumer details and providing a secured checkout procedure, this new version will fulfill every major need of an advanced eCommerce website development.

• Improved checkout process

Magento 2 platform provides an efficient, simple and secure checkout to your eCommerce website. It provides an approach to recognize users as their guests. This eradicates the login or registration form that is required for visitors to continue the checkout procedure.

• Mobile-friendly and Responsive Design

Magento 2 provides mobile-friendly and responsive designs for delivering an exceptional checkout experience to its users.

• Advanced Reporting

Reporting is very important in the success of your eCommerce business. This feature provides you insight into three crucial areas, such as orders, customers, products.

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Software and hardware requirements

Your server should have the following mentioned programs for the migration:

• PHP:- 7.0.13+ or 7.1.x
• MySQL: 5.6, 5.7 or MariaDB 10.0,10.1,10.2 or Percona 5.7
• The following PHP extensions: bc-math, curl, ctype, dom, gd, intl, mbstring, mcrypt, hash, spl, libxml, xsl, zip, openssl, PDO/MySQL, SimpleXML, soap, json, iconv
• Minimum 2G of RAM
• 24GB+ SSD

The update can be executed in 5 steps that include –

• Theme purchase & customization
• Extensions review & migration
• Code customizations
• Data migration
• Testing,Testing, Testing

Let’s Begin!

Step 1: Theme purchase & customization

There are high odds that you would need to give a fresh look to your website as your existing website will not be able to function with Magento 2.

There are two solutions to this problem –

• You can buy a new web design from the Magento Marketplace.
• You can hire a professional developer to configure your existing website according to the latest Magento 2 version.

Step 2: Extensions review & migration

Extensions could be a hassle. If you have purchased a new design, then you can easily integrate extensions on your website. Still, if you are customizing your original site, then you would need to customize the existing extension on your own, according to version 2.

The Magento community and programmers are putting their efforts to make the procedure of porting Magento 1 extensions to Magento 2 a simple process but until then just install the best Magento 2 extensions from the Magento marketplace.

Note: Most of the widely used Magento 1 extensions will have an update for Magento 2 version.

Step 3: Code customization

Often, users utilize custom code to make their website easy to use and convert more visitors to customers more frequently. If this is the case with you, then don’t worry! 

We will guide you through the solution.

In most of the cases, the custom code utilized in Magento 1 is relevant with Magento 2, but it also needs to be taken into consideration that structural differences are present in both the platforms so there may be some additional efforts required.

You can easily download the code migration tool from Magento Marketplace. Magento offers this tool to help its users to migrate the code without any muddles.

Step 4: Data migration

The last step in the Magento migration procedure is to migrate your settings and data, which includes orders, products, store configurations, settings, categories, etc. to Magento 2.

Data migration can be a tough process, but if you follow our steps thoroughly, you will slide through the process!

Data migration will mostly include migrating inventory, shipping, customers, order, and other details of your website. Magento has presented a data migration tool to perform this job. This official tool by Magento easily migrates your stored data and settings to Magento 2 using CLI commands.

The process is not automated. You will need to configure the steps for a smooth migration.

Installing the data migration tool

You can install the data migration tool using the composer. Before installing, make sure that the version of the Magento 2 store and the release of Data Migration Tool matches.

E.g., if you are using Magento 1.9.5, then you need to install the data migration tool version 1.9.5.

To find the version of your store, navigate to the root directory of your Magento 2 via Secure Shell (SSH) and enter the following command –

php bin/magento –version

After you get your version of the store run the following command in composer –

composer config repositories.magento composer https://repo.magento.com

composer require magento/data-migration-tool:<version>

As we are using 1.9.5, the second command line will be –

composer require magento/data-migration-tool:1.9.5

As soon as you run the command composer will ask you to enter the authentication keys. You can retrieve them by visiting your Magento Marketplace account, click on Access Keys under My products tab.

Now you have successfully installed the data migration tool.

Configure data migration tool

After the installation finishes, the following directories will contain mapping and configuration files for the Data Migration Tool.

<Magento 2 root dir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/opensource-to-opensource

This file will contain configuration and scripts for migrating from Magento 1 open-source platform to Magento 2 open-source platform.

<Magento 2 root dir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/opensource-to-commerce

This file will contain configuration and scripts for migrating from Magento 1 open-source platform to Magento 2 Commerce.

<Magento 2 root dir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/commerce-to-commerce

This file will contain configuration and scripts for migrating from Magento 1 Commerce to Magento 2 Commerce.

Before migrating any settings or data, you have to create a config.xml file in the relevant directory. For example, if you are doing a data migration from Magento 1 open-source platform to Magento 2 open-source platform, navigate to the

<Magento2rootdir>/vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/commerce-to-commerce/<Magento 1.x version> directory and rename config.xml.dist to config.xml

Edit your config.xml file as shown below –

In the above code, <source> has the database information of Magento 1 and <destination> has the database information of Magento 2.

Here, <crypt_key> is mandatory. It is the encryption key of the Magento 1 store. You can find it in the <Magento 1 root dir>/app/etc/local.xml file, within the <key> tag.

When finished, save the config.xml. Now your installation is successful.

Now, it’s time for the migration. According to Magento, you should migrate your settings first and data afterwards.

Migrate settings

To start migrating the settings, navigate to your Magento 2 root directory via Shell (SSH) terminal and run the following command –

php bin/magento migrate:settings –reset <path to your config.xml>

where <path to your config.xml> this would be –

vendor/magento/data-migration-tool/etc/opensource-to-opensource/<Magento 1.x version>/config.xml.

We have used –reset argument in the above command, which will force the data migration tool to start from the beginning. After successful completion, a success message will show up.

Migrate data

Data migration includes products, categories, ratings, wishlist, etc. To migrate all this data, just run the following shell command –

php bin/magento migrate:data –reset <path to your config.xml>

Note – You might encounter some errors during the migration process. In that case, please refer to the troubleshooting page of the Magento 2 data migration tool for further assistance.

After the successful completion of the migration, be sure to test the website thoroughly. Despite following the complete steps, it might be possible that you might face some issues as the entire migration process is not fully automated.

To get proper and hassle-free migration, it is advisable to put work in the hands of a Magento 2 certified developer.

Migration of media files

Expect to manually migrate a few elements of your site, such as videos, animations, images, etc. Just synchronize the media files before migration:

Magento 1 backend menu > System > Configuration > Advanced > System

Click on a synchronize button.

When things go wrong

The Magento 2 migration procedure isn’t always simple, and many tasks may not go as planned.

Below, you’ll find some of the most common problems you might face while moving to M2.

• Empty category / Landing Page
• Missing catalog images
• “No Such Entity” error
• Double .html.html in Product Urls

A few final words

Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration is a difficult task, but with great planning and attention to detail, you can pull it off with little ease. 

One essential piece of advice is to test your migrated Magento 2 store and test every aspect of it.

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Why choose MagnoStack for Magento 2 migration?

At MagnoStack, our highly skilled developers offer customized Magento 2 migration services to help you get maximum advantages from this robust platform. 

Our services aid you expedite your efficiency and lend it a desired aggressive edge. We are backed by a team of expert Magento developers at MagnoStack who ensure complete accuracy, security, fast and error-free Magento 2 migration services. We provide:

• Almost zero downtime
• No loss of data
• Full security
• Timely delivery