What are the difficulties in Magento migration?

However, like with any platform, there are a few challenges associated with the migration of Magento from 1.x to Magento 2.x. If migration is done without any roadmap or strategy in place, there can be a serious issue with your business. Let’s take a look at the few top Magento migration difficulties:

• Data Migration

Data migration is the process of transferring data whether it is product data, customer data, sales data, etc to the new platform. Migrating all the data to Magento 2 though sounds simple can be quite difficult and strenuous if not planned properly. The main aim of the migration is to provide seamless browsing and shopping experience to customers. With the migration to the new platform, you should be careful that old customers can access their accounts in the same effortless manner. In a large number of cases, it is seen that after migration to Magento 2 there is a loss of old customer data, and customers have to register again. In such a scenario, ensure that a quick password reset mechanism is in place. Similar to customer data, products, their attributes require migration to the new platform along with the images and inventory. If possible, try to migrate the sales historical figure to compare with the new sales figures and get a comparative number. Also, it is beneficial to retain the historical sales data of customers that they can access. If you have a “Resources” section on your website comprising of Blogs and White papers, then you need to migrate those as well in order to maintain your SEO rankings and organic traffic of your website.

Data migration is the most crucial but complicated process. To complete this process efficiently, it is often wise to employ the services of a web development company. 

• Handling of 301 redirects and 404 errors

The landing pages URL has been cached and already built considerable authority in various search engines. So, you need to try to have the same URLs for the products, categories, CMS pages, etc even on the new platform. In case, the URLs need to be changed, a proper 301 redirections should be in place. Magento has an in-built proper 301 redirection module to handle this. So, once you create a 301 redirect URL, it informs search engines that the requested URL has moved to another URL. This saves all your SEO rankings and you do not lose out on business or have to work on the SEO settings from scratch. Keep a tab on your webmaster tool to find out any newly generated 404 errors. 

There might also be an issue of duplicate content if the canonical URLs are not properly set. When migrating to Magento 2, you need to set up a basic SEO perspective as it helps to avoid duplicate content and onsite SEO issues. 

Look for proper hosting services when migrating to Magento 2, because improper hosting or caching can lead to downtime. 

Migration to Magento 2 is now essential and not an option anymore. Magento has stopped releasing security patches for both Enterprise and Community versions (now called Magento Commerce 1 and Magento Open Source 1 respectively) from June 2020. In order to keep the data of the customer and store owner safe, it’s imperative that stores are upgraded to the latest version of Magento.