Magento 2 eCommerce Website Advantages

Which version of Magento are you running? If you’re still running version 1, you should know that Adobe (who bought Magento in May 2018) recently announced that support for Magento 1 will end in June 2020.

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Magento 2 benefits, what are they?

Since Magento 2 release in 2015 thousands of retailers have considered migration to Magento 2 platform because it is well performed, easy to go with and has numerous improvements including

• Full-page cache: overall site speed and also 1-2 seconds of page loading comparing to 5-10 without full cashing. Faster site speed encourages more sales and increases website SEO.
• Another super-friendly feature is an upgraded and shortened check-out.
• Renewed stack technologies (such as PHP, MYSQL)
• Magento Commerce (Cloud), formerly Enterprise Cloud Edition combines Magento Commerce, Cloud infrastructure hosting, with added features such as Git integration, key environments for development, staging, and live production.
• Mobile-oriented layouts is a huge plus – since the number of mobile users has rapidly increased in the past 2 years and keep growing.
• Key-integration such as PayPal and Braintree make the payment settings much easier and faster. It is also more secure, but what is most valuable – a much much better admin interface.
• Improved shopping and user experience through introducing your products amended with product snaps and descriptions, also you can provide relevant videos that can express your products in a way you need to, and increase your sales significantly.
• Better search built in (such as Elasticsearch and Sphinx, beginning from 2.3 Elasticsearch becomes free)
• Omnichannel oriented features and various extensions, including MSI (multi-source inventory) making your store flexible and scalable.
• Able to customize the admin panel admins can access information quickly. This increases productivity rapidly, especially managing products, orders, and customer data. 4x faster product import capabilities make the creating products in the admin panel easier and even fun.
• The code is fully covered with automatic tests.
• Scalability: Magento 2 EE offers database split which helps high-load projects to improve performance
• Rich content features with BlueFoot for Enterprise Edition

Migrate, or not migrate – this is the question. 

Since the very release of Magento 2, there was a variety of thoughts: pros and cons for migration. Real Magento 1 fans would say, that they are totally happy with a stable platform besides they became so used to it. As a company of really dedicated developers, we have also investigated this question, first of all, to perform the best consultancy for our clients. So if you still question yourself, take a look at our reasons for Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration:

• Most reasonable migration is when you are just unsatisfied with your Magento 1 store performance (especially if this is one of the benefits in Magento 2: speed, user experience, inventory management, product management).
• You have an outdated version of Magento 1 – anything before 1.8 community edition and 1.13 enterprise edition we may call too old and this is a perfect chance to consider migration.
• It is time to change your online store significantly.
• You chose to go omnichannel and faced difficulties in inventory management.
• You wish to reduce the cost of the development and need a comfortable page-builder. (which is coming in 2.3 version soon)
• Security updates: you will be able to install security patches only till the end of M1 support period (end of 2018)

Data migration sounds easy: you just copy and paste products, categories, customers data, and orders. Oh, this would be a perfect world!

What you need to know before considering migration from Magento 1 to Magento 2. 

Now is a perfect time for migration since most of the custom extensions are already rebuilt, Magento 2 has become stable and solved most of the problems that were in M 2.0, also Magento 2.3 is expected to release within a month – together with MSI and page builder inbox.

But – there is always a “but”.

• If you have a plenty of custom extension built into your M1 store the migration will take 2-3 month – this also includes the extensions updating.
• If you are going to use a migration tool, you need to remember: theme and code customizations (which includes 3rd party extensions) will not be transferable. So you need to be ready that this is almost creating a brand new website.

Why It’s Worth It

Your business will grow only when you keep investing and changing – this is an axiom. You can breathe in the fresh air into your company adding new features, improving the customer experience and optimising the work of your marketing, sales and customer support departments giving them a new upgraded and modern tool.

The process of migration to Magento 2

Here is an infographic for your introduction into the process before we show you how it goes on the real example. Credit source article.

1.Create a migration plan

Timeframe: 2-3 weeks.

The coding hasn’t started yet, but be careful: this step is the most important and influences all the process: the more specific and clear you are at this stage the more time you will save on development and fixes. The migration plan consists of 3 clear steps:

1. Plan for migration (migration details) for data: products, categories, customers, orders, and content: articles, pages.
2. Project specifications – comes in case if any additional functional development is needed. Here we describe how the project should look like and function on the final stage. This means that every page, every tab, button, and the block has to be described here. We suggest using some digital tools such as Invision for example.
3. Project planning – a step-by-step list of milestones with deadlines and definitions of done descriptions.

2. Preparing testing environment

Timeframe: few days.

It is highly recommended that you perform each step of migration and develop all related projects in a separate environment (on an allocated server) so that your current store will run in the same mode without any interruptions associated with the migration process.

At this point, we prepare a test development environment and install a standard Magento 2 (Community or Enterprise), and configure the version control system (GIT / SVN) so that everything is ready to run the project.

3. Extensions installation and development of specific functionality.

Timeframe: 2-3 weeks.

Now we start to move forward according to a plan on step 1:

• Updated all modules used on M1 store to the equivalent on M2.
• Develop own extensions or additional functional on M2.

It’s at this stage we update SEO modules, comparison feature, developed a bestseller extension and set up the module for displaying chosen categories in the menu on the home page.

4. Data migration

Timeframe: few days.

On this step, we transfer the data from the M1 database to M2 database.

As you might already know there is a tool developed extra for data transfer and you can learn more on official Magento site: Devdocs

Please note, we mentioned before, that this tool allows transferring only the data existing in Magento by default: everything except files and control access configurations.

This migration tool works on one of three different modes.

Also remember: the data of third-party modules will not be transferred.

If you have modules whose developers do not support them properly (for which there are no migration tools or there are no versions for Magento 2, it is recommended to use other more reliable extensions – you may found a lot on Amasty, Magestore, Mirasvit, Mageplaza, Mageworks. An alternative solution to the problem can be the development of the necessary module in-house from scratch, but this is an additional time that needs 2-3 weeks to be added to the time-frame. Of course, in case of custom extension development, you will have more reliable and secure modules.

We need to chiefly admit Custom Mount finder module, which allows making the fitting mount search really fast and comfortable. As well as comparison feature, which is really important in such a peculiar market. Installed and set up the module for displaying chosen categories in greed on the home page and bestseller module displaying products according to sales statistics (with the ability to insert widget and put special products in spite of statistics).so we have spent 10 days for this step.

5. Creating a design for Magento 2.

Timeframe: 3-4 weeks.

The themes for the Magento 1.x and Magento 2.x platforms are incompatible. It is not possible to copy the current theme for Magento 1.x to Magento 2 and use it.

As a solution for quickly launching the project on Magento 2, we recommend that you adapt a theme (from Magento 2) in the desired way.

The choice of a custom design may lead to a prolongation. This was a case for Mount IT – a specific narrow-niche products website demanded a unique design and it took us 2 weeks additionally to create it.

Third-party topics are presumably not so well tested and will not be supported as well as ready themes.

Therefore, some companies recommend to you use the predeveloped theme as the basis for your new design. But when it comes to our company – we already have a solid experience in creating a custom design for Magento stores.

We described the most effective and least time-consuming way to solve the problem with a relatively short time to market.

6. Launching plan and additional synchronization of the database.

Timeframe: few days.

After we have tested the final code and checked the custom developed solution, the time for project launch has come.

We have set up our server according to the new system requirements for Magento 2, but it is also possible to buy a compatible with Magento 2 hosting.

Additional synchronisation is needed to transfer the latest data from a Magento 1 site to a Magento 2-based site (products, categories, users, orders).

7. Magento 2 store launch on a live server.

Time frame: up to 1 week

This is the last step of the project migration – the launch of your Magento 2-based website at a chosen time under the developer’s control.

If everything was done correctly and according to the plan, eventually you will see your new working store based on Magento 2, launched in a reasonable time frame.

Magento 2 Experts – Fusionsoft, UK

Fusionsoft are experienced in eCommerce website migration, with in-house Magento experts. Hire a specialist eCommerce website agency  – we are a Magento 2 certified partner and we are well versed in Magento 2.2 website migration.