Migration of existing Magento 1 e-commerce website to Magento 2 has become an essential since Magento 1 announced their end of service/support in June 2020. Lack of support means Magento 1 websites will not receive regular updates and security patches and therefore are more vulnerable to security attacks.
We have had many clients requesting for Magento 2 migration, and one of our works was with The Journal of Chinese Medicine (JCM). This case study is an example of how we work, the challenges we faced and how we overcame that with different solutions to deliver a satisfactory result to the client.
JCM’s old site which is multi-website and multi-currency ran in Magento 1. But since Magento 1 was obsolete and no longer supported by Adobe with updates and security patches the store would be vulnerable to security attacks. Realizing the potential security risks JCM decided to work with us to migrate their Magento 1 shop to Magento 2.
While the main reasons for migrating the shop to M2 was the lack of support from Adobe and security vulnerability, they also had few other expectations in their mind regarding the M2 store. The expectations included,
After the decision of migration was made, we made the roadmap and proceeded with migration of JCM website from Magento 1 to Magento 2. We gave JCM a detailed schedule and timeline for the project so that they could easily follow up our progress.
Below is the summary of the work we did during the Magento 2 migration projects.
We faced few challenges during this migration process.
JCM Magento 1 website was using a third-party extension to create and manage static contents, categories to manage the menu and contents in frontend which was not using Magento’s own category structure. Since the same extension was not available in Magento 2 we had to find an alternative solution and migrate the data without affecting the site structure. Considering the future Magento upgrades, we had multiple discussions with the client and convinced them to use the default Magento category and static blocks instead of depending on any other third-party extension.
Based on our experience with JCM shop migration, our recommendations during data migration from M1 to M2 are.
– Take backup of the Magento 1 store, including all files, folders, and the database.
– Use a clone of your Magento 1 store for data migration. Do not use the live store for the Magento migration process.
– Do a full analysis of your store. Keep the necessary entities only whether it is data or code and delete the rest.
– Confirm whether the current theme(s), extensions and other custom code are compatible with Magento 2.
– Migrate data from the cloned database of your Magento 1 store.
– Remove outdated and useless data from the database including logs, recently viewed products, compared products, etc.
– Remove orphan records from your database. That is, ids which are referenced in tables, but the actual data no longer exists.
