Magento is the most populair e-commerce platform in the Benelux. Magento's first version exists for over a decade. And e-commerce has changed a lot during these years. It has been growing rapidly and changed many times, so updating the platform is necessary.

Users have grown more accustomed to shopping online and they also expect more of webshops these days. Also, the online sellers expect more features from existing platforms. Those expectations range from low loading times to a responsive design, which are considered standard features in modern platforms. This is the reason why Magento had to be updated and Adobe has decided to stop supporting Magento 1 and focus on optimising Magento 2.

Magento 2 is in many ways superior to Magento 1. So once you have decided to implement Magento 2, you want this to happen without any hiccups. Not only will this migration be of considerable size, it is very important to plan ahead and pay attention every step of the way.

To make sure this happens without loss of data and features, it is advised to ask an experienced partner such as PHPro to do this for you and guide you in this process. This will not only save you time and trouble, but also money in the long run.

As we mentioned before, Magento 2 has many advantages compared to Magento 1. Here you can find a shrt list of some of these advantages:

• New backend interface with more features
• More users can work in this backend simultaneously
• Drag & Drop content builder
• Scheduling content
• New multi-step checkout
• Support for PWA
• Better response times for crucial pages such as the checkout and the cart
• More computing power for processing orders, customer data and product data
• Server response time has been improved significantly
• Improved scalability with Magento Cloud
• Up-to-date security features
• Reporting and dashboards have been updated
• Automated testing has been added for development

Your webshop wll not suddenly stop working when Adobe stops supporting Magento 1. It will just not be updated anymore. This doesn't really sound like a big deal but consider this: no security updates, no PHP patches and also no bug fixes.

Also, there's also the risk of having a instable webshop. You can compare this to driving a car that hasn't passed M.O.T. You wouldn't want to do that either.

Changing platforms isn't easy. You are going to reimplement large sections of your webshop. The numerous lines of code and complexities, custom solutions, make this a challenging endeavour.

So, here are some critical steps to make sure moving to Magento 2 happens as flawlessly as possible:

• Plan the migration of data
  • PIM
  • Customer data
  • Orders
  • Promotional settings
  • Webshop settings
  • Modules and extensions
  • Webdesign, UX and themes
  • SEO plans or optimisations
  • Redirecting traffic from the old webpages to the new ones

2. Test the migration

• By testing different setups on different test environments

3. Test the results

• Thoroughly test on an acceptation server before going live (UAT - User Acceptance Testing)
• Updating analytical tools
  • To keep tracking traffic
  • To track conversions
  • To keep track of optimisations