Important Things to Know Before Migrating to Magento 2
Magento 2 was released in November 2015 as the up-to-date version of the Magento platform which is used by 1 in 4 organizations worldwide. Magento 2 comes with several new and improved developer tools, features, and its design is quite different from other versions.
The Magento 2 offers several benefits that resolve issues with Magento 1; here are some key benefits of Magento 2:
· Improved Performance: the website builds on Magento 2 will run approximately 20% faster than the website build on Magento 1. It has been proven that faster sites are more likely to rank better on search engine and increase sales.
· Streamlined Checkout Process: Magento 1 has a long six (6) step checkout process, whereas Magento 2 reduces the steps to 2 with instant purchase feature. With this, business owners can offer returning customers an express checkout experience by utilizing previously-stored shipping information and payment credentials to skip checkout steps and directly taking users to a confirmation purchase page.
· Improved Admin Interface: Magento 1’s interface was often confusing for users, on the other hand, Magento 2 provides a clean, user-friendly interface which enables non-technical users to operate and make adding a new product is a breeze.
· Mobile Friendly: This is the most important feature in the today’s world as more and more people are turning to smartphones. Having a mobile responsive site is imperative to survive the competition. Magento 2.3 comes with Progressive Web Application (PWA) Studio which takes mobile performance even further.
Why does it is important to migrate the ecommerce website to Magento 2?
Magento announced that they will no longer providing support for Magento 1 post June 2020. However, the support has not ended, but it is clear that the days of Magento 1 are very less.
Important things to consider if you decide to stick with Magento 1:
- Once the support is ended, you won’t be able to produce security patches for these versions.
- No new and innovative features will be added to Magento 1 which will impact on your competitive edge.
- Increase the chances of getting hacked as the code grows older.
As running unsupported tool is extremely risky, especially when the tool that isn’t supporting a fundamental part of your operation, it is viable moving to Magento 2 before June 2020.
Magento 2 offers Future-Readiness
Magento 2 uses the latest features and technologies like LAMP stack (Linux, Apache/Nginx MySql, PHP) with other techniques like Performance Monitoring through New Relic, Full Page Caching, Database Clustering, Blackfire.io, Extended Reporting through Magento Business Intelligence, Pagebuilder WYSIWYG CMS and Magento Shipping. Magento’s flexibility and interoperability through APIs is another reason to choose this platform over the long haul, allowing partners and merchants to adjust to the varying commerce environment.
What you can expect from the Magento 2 migration?
Migrating to Magento 2 from Magento 1 includes changing themes, database structures, and dealing with a new API. Select the best magento development company in the industry to migrate your website to avoid downtime and data loss.
Below are some important points that you need to consider while migrating from M1 to M2:
· Consider upgrading your current website parallelly with the migration.
· As you are migrating your website, this is the best time for you to make some major changes to your ecommerce website to keep it ready for the next level of digital growth.
· Hire Magento developer with expertise in the industry to understand whether your web store needs to be revamped using more advanced topology, more hardware, etc.
Which Magento 2 is right for your needs?
There are two versions of Magento 2 available in the market and you can choose the best suited platform for your business.
- Magento Commerce 2: This is the enterprise version of Magento 2 and is designed for medium to large businesses and comes with marketing, extensive management, business intelligence options and B2B. This is a cloud-hosted, offering business owners the benefit of a support contract and single contract for hosting and commerce. In limited cases, Magento Commerce can be configured on-premise.
- Magento 2 Open Source: The free open source version of Magento 2 does not come with an account or technical management support or other capabilities related to conversion, scalability and efficiency which are native to Magento Commerce 2. This version is most suited for smaller businesses or funded startups.
Other Important Considerations
- Custom Code and Extensions: During the Magento ecommerce development using M1, you might have used third-party extensions to meet some out of the box functionality. While migrating to M2, a conscientious review has to be done to ensure whether or not the extensions can be replaced or removed with Magento 2 features or a Magento 2 compatible extension from the Magento Marketplace.
- The Right Magento Development Service Partner is Important to Success: Irrespective of which Magento 2 version you choose for your ecommerce development, moving to Magento 2 needs a careful approach.
- Budget: Similar to upgrade between different versions of Magento 1, the effort to move a website from Magento 1 to Magento 2 mostly depends on how you have developed your website and the level of customization. As mentioned above, migration is the appropriate time to upgrade to the eCommerce store according to different factors like improving upon the User Experience (UX). Improvements like these will influence the cost of migration to Magento 2.
If you are also looking to migrate your website from Magento 1 to Magento 2 or looking to develop a website from scratch on Magento 2, you simply need to contact Panacea. Our team of expert professionals will help you further.
