Learn what can go wrong during Magento 2 migration and how to avoid costly issues with expert planning and development support.
Magento, released in 2007, is currently among the world leaders in e-commerce platforms. Over the years, it has acquired a lot of new features and enhancements. In 2015, Magento 2 saw the light of day.
With its useful admin interface, improved checkout, excellent page loading speed, impressive performance, and cutting-edge search capabilities, Magento 2 was welcomed by the e-commerce community with great enthusiasm. However, many merchants weren’t rushing to migrate to the new version. Why so?
Magento 2 was not just a simple update as was the case with the varieties of Magento 1. Instead, it marked a major upgrade. This meant that it was almost a completely new system with features that differed greatly from its predecessor. Thus, porting assets from the old platform to the new one was a long and laborious process that entailed serious risks of data assets being damaged or lost.
While migrating to the new platform was not mandatory, it was quite obvious that the maintenance of the old system would be terminated sooner or later. Now, the zero hour is just a few months away. Adobe, which bought Magento in 2018, announced that it would cease to provide any kind of support for Magento 1.x as of June 2020. Consequently, merchants running their sites on Magento 1.x were left to fend for themselves in an Internet full of cybercriminals of all sorts.
There were no more security patches to protect those old-version-powered stores from the latest security threats and no more advanced features to improve performance and user experience. This may negatively impact the bottom line and deal a painful blow to the merchants’ reputations.
A much wiser approach is to migrate to Magento 2, and the sooner the better. This way, you will get a secure e-commerce solution with advanced B2B and B2C features that perfectly renders across different devices and screen resolutions, loads twice as fast as Magento 1.x stores do, and has many other attractive features.
The migration process, as we’ve already said, is not simple and has some unpleasant pitfalls you’ll have to deal with. Let’s take a look at the most common of those.
Well, fasten your seatbelts. We begin our rough ride from point A (Magento 1.x) to point B (Magento 2.x). The first bump along the way is the incompatibility of themes between the two major versions.
You may have been using your current theme for years. You’ve perfectly customized it to meet your specific business requirements and have never had any problems with it. You’d be happy to port it to your new Magento 2 site and continue using it for as many years.
Alas, Magento 1 and Magento 2 themes are like two halves of a big puzzle that just don’t fit together. You’ll have to search for a similar ready-made M2 theme, either free or paid, and tweak it to suit your tastes and needs.
However, altering the look and feel of the theme is only part of the story. You’ll also have to perform its all-around testing to ensure that your store customizations still work with the new theme as you expect it.
Another approach is to build an entirely new M2 theme. Since it assumes rewriting the front-end code (changing CSS styles and HTML structure), this solution is more expensive. That being said, it’s a wonderful opportunity to give your store a new lease on life. It will have a modern look and perform faster.
Again, over many years of your store’s operation, you may have installed tons of extensions, both custom and those built by third-party developers. They allowed you to run your site smoothly. Shipping, inventory management, payment, discounts — you have taken care of every important business aspect.
Now that the time has come to move over to Magento 2, you’d prefer keeping your time-tested extensions on. We have to disappoint you here too: all third-party extensions created for the M1 version will be absolutely useless on an online store powered by Magento 2.
So, you’ll have to put up with the necessity to search for the equivalents of your current extensions in the official Magento marketplace, and there’s a good chance of finding them. Over the past five years, developers across the globe have built the M2 versions of extensions for the majority of business functions.
Another option, just like in the case of themes, is to have a custom extension built to replace the previous version. This requires larger investments. In return, however, you get an add-on that does exactly what you want.
Themes and extensions are important components of any online store, Magento-based or otherwise. However, for the normal operation of an e-commerce site, there is nothing as crucial as product and customer data. Lose it and you may have to say good-bye to your entire business.
Unfortunately, this is yet another bump on the road from Magento 1 to Magento 2, too. If your site is quite old and has been maintained by different developers, there is a chance that the tables in the database are not neat enough for straightforward migration by means of scripts or the default Migration Tool.
Sometimes the database table structure is so messed up that a clean install of Magento 1.x is the only way to put things straight before even considering a move to Magento 2. That’s why we highly recommend performing a detailed review of all the data stored in your database first. Identify the data that is pivotal for your business and port it to Magento 2 in the first turn, then migrate less important data, and so on.
Oh, yes, and remember to back up your database to several locations, including your local file system, an external drive, and the cloud. You can also try data migration on a staging environment first, for example, on a different server. Considering the great importance of safe customer and product data migration, the wisest approach is to seek professional assistance.
Businesses must earn money every single day. Otherwise, they will soon go broke, and there the story ends. Do you have to shut down your present site for the duration of the migration process? No, you don’t. You can keep it running.
Be prepared that your store’s speed may drop significantly, though. According to some sources, a 2-second increase in page loading speed leads to a 100% increase in bounce rate. Fewer visitors mean worse sales down the line. What can you do?
Have a good look at your current store and apply the most common optimization techniques (merging CSS and JS files, caching your pages, and others) to make it work faster.
You should also plan “the starting gun” for when the business activity is at its lowest.
Want to migrate right before Christmas or Easter? Think twice. A slow-loading site during probably the best time of year for businesses won’t likely bring in much revenue.
There’s no point in building a website, optimizing it for better performance, and stuffing it with advanced features if no one except your team sees it on the Internet.
However, this is what often happens after the 1 to 2 move. You may suddenly find that you have two identical copies of the same content, your pages may surprisingly get new URLs, or one of the internal links, to your horror, may start redirecting to a 404 page.
All these problems may cause your hard-won SEO rankings to remain nothing but a distant memory. This means your leads will not see your site on the first search engine results page. The number of new visitors will drop, and sales will suffer. Regaining the lost ground may take ages.
There can be multiple reasons why you experience SEO issues after migrating to M2 (e.g., web crawlers failing to screen the robots file properly). You can handle all these issues (by using 301 redirects, working with canonical URLs properly, formatting internal links in compliance with M2 guidelines, and so on). However, to avoid trouble, hiring experienced and skilled Magento 2 experts is the best step you can take.
As you can see, the process of migration between two major versions of the leading e-commerce platform requires considerable skill and extensive knowledge of the system and takes quite a long time to complete, especially for enterprise-sized stores.
There are a number of steps to take before, during, and after migration. Designing a plan, setting up the environment for testing purposes, building custom extensions and installing ready-made ones, porting data, and finally deploying your new Magento 2 store to a live server — all this may span weeks or even months, depending on how large or complicated the project is.
For a trouble-free migration process, partner with GetDevDone, a reliable development company. We provide a wide range of migration services, including the following:
Yes, Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration is still relevant in 2026 for stores that still run Magento 1 or another outdated Commerce setup, but the old Magento 1 support deadline is not upcoming anymore. Official Magento 1 support ended in June 2020, so the current issue is security exposure, unsupported extensions, aging server dependencies, payment provider compatibility, and compliance risk.
A migration should not be treated as a simple version update. Magento 2 has a different architecture, theme layer, extension ecosystem, and checkout/data model. Before committing, the store owner or agency should confirm whether Magento is still the right platform for the catalog, integrations, B2B needs, multi-store setup, and operational budget. If Magento is still the right fit, the safer goal is a supported Magento 2 or Adobe Commerce build with clean data, tested extensions, and an SEO-safe launch plan.
A Magento 1 theme usually cannot be migrated directly to Magento 2; it normally has to be rebuilt or replaced. The visual direction, brand assets, UX ideas, and some content can be reused, but the theme code itself does not map cleanly because Magento 2 uses a different front-end structure.
The practical choice is between customizing a Magento 2-ready theme and building a custom Magento 2 theme. A ready-made theme can reduce cost if the store has standard layouts and limited custom interaction. A custom theme makes more sense when the current store has specific checkout flows, catalog templates, promotional blocks, or performance requirements. The hidden work is not only visual rebuilding. Checkout, responsive behavior, scripts, tracking, structured data, and extension compatibility all need testing.
Magento 1 extensions do not carry over as working Magento 2 extensions. During migration, each module has to be inventoried, mapped to a Magento 2 equivalent, removed, reconfigured, or rebuilt as a custom module.
This is where many migrations become larger than expected. Payment, shipping, inventory, tax, discounts, loyalty, product feeds, ERP or CRM syncs, and custom checkout logic may all rely on old modules. Some have direct replacements in Magento Marketplace or from the same vendor, but replacement does not always mean identical behavior. Data formats, configuration fields, cron jobs, API behavior, and license terms can change. For agency-led projects, extension review should happen before quoting the build, because one business-critical custom module can change scope, timeline, QA effort, and launch risk.
Product, customer, and order data should be protected through a full data audit, multiple backups, staged test migrations, and validation before anything is moved to production. The risky part is not only copying data; it is preserving relationships between products, categories, customers, addresses, orders, invoices, coupons, attributes, and custom fields.
A safe process starts with identifying which data is business-critical, which data can be archived, and which database tables are messy because of years of extensions or developer changes. Migration should be tested in a staging environment first, with checks for sample orders, customer accounts, product variants, media, taxes, and admin workflows. In an agency delivery workflow, this is also where handoff matters: the agency, client, and developers need one agreed checklist for what “data migrated correctly” means before the launch window.
Magento 2 migration can cause SEO problems if URLs, redirects, canonicals, internal links, metadata, and indexation controls are not mapped before launch. The common visible symptoms are 404 errors, duplicate content, lost rankings, crawl traps, missing category or product metadata, broken internal links, and unexpected noindex or robots.txt behavior.
The highest-risk areas are product and category URLs, filtered navigation, pagination, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, hreflang if used, structured data, and redirects from old URLs to new equivalents. SEO checks should not be left for post-launch cleanup. They should be part of staging QA, with crawl comparisons between the old and new store. After deployment, the team should monitor server logs, Search Console, index coverage, key landing pages, and revenue-driving queries, because some migration issues only appear once search engines recrawl the new structure.
A Magento 2 migration usually takes from several weeks to several months, depending on store size and technical complexity. A smaller store with a clean database, few extensions, and a ready Magento 2 theme can move faster. A large store with custom modules, complex catalog rules, integrations, multilingual or multi-store setup, and heavy SEO requirements needs more time.
The timeline is usually shaped by four things: data quality, extension replacement, theme rebuilding, and testing. Hidden delays often come from old custom logic that no one documented, inconsistent product attributes, unsupported third-party modules, or late SEO redirect mapping. For agencies, it is safer to split the work into audit, migration plan, staging build, QA, client approval, deployment, and post-launch stabilization instead of selling it as one broad migration task.
The safest time to schedule a Magento migration is during the store’s lowest commercial activity period, with enough buffer before any seasonal peak. It is usually a bad idea to launch right before Christmas, Easter, Black Friday, a campaign launch, or a major client promotion.
Even when the old store stays live during development, migration work can affect performance, content operations, testing capacity, and internal attention. The final deployment also needs a controlled window for database freeze, order sync, DNS or server changes, QA, analytics checks, and rollback readiness. A safer schedule leaves time for staging review, client approval, bug fixing, and post-launch monitoring. For stores with steady daily revenue, a low-traffic weekday or night launch window is usually easier to control than a rushed weekend before a sales event.
A failed Magento migration should first be audited, not automatically fixed, rolled back, or rebuilt. The right choice depends on what failed: data integrity, theme implementation, extensions, checkout, performance, SEO, integrations, or deployment process.
Fixing makes sense when the foundation is sound and the problems are isolated. Rolling back is safer when checkout, orders, payments, or customer data are unreliable and the old store can still operate. Rebuilding is usually more realistic when the new Magento 2 store was built on poor architecture, wrong extensions, broken data assumptions, or undocumented customizations. In agency workflows, the first step should be a rescue audit with staging access, admin access, deployment history, error logs, SEO crawl data, and a clear decision on whether the next action is stabilization, rollback, or rebuild.
A Magento migration audit should include the current theme, extensions, database structure, catalog model, integrations, hosting environment, SEO footprint, and deployment constraints. The goal is to understand what can be transferred, what must be replaced, and what should be cleaned before development starts.
A practical audit should cover:
For agency projects, the audit should also define ownership: who approves data samples, who signs off SEO mapping, who tests checkout, and who handles client communication during deployment.
An agency should involve external Magento specialists when the migration risk is higher than the agency’s in-house Magento experience. That usually means custom modules, complex data, multiple stores, B2B workflows, payment or inventory integrations, SEO-sensitive URLs, or a client who cannot afford checkout downtime.
The best time to involve specialists is before scope and timeline are promised to the client. A Magento migration touches development, data, infrastructure, SEO, QA, and launch operations, so a late handoff can leave the external team cleaning up decisions they did not make. For agencies, a partner works best when strategy and client communication stay in-house, while Magento-specific audit, rebuild, testing, deployment support, and post-launch fixes are handled behind the scenes with clear handoff points.
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