Magento 2 Migration – The 2024 Guide + Case Study

Out of 195,425 Magento’s live online stores, there are just 87,012 sites that have completed their Magento 2 migration (As of 05/05/2021). And the rest of the 108,413 merchants using the Magento Commerce Platform are now prone to a number of vulnerabilities.

With an increase in the number of web skimming (Magecart) attacks, such web stores will face the risk of getting hacked and infected with code that steals customers’ payment details. This gets businesses to strategize on how to hire Magento developers from a competent Magento development company in order to avoid such scenarios in future.

This is the reason that some of the leading eCommerce businesses such as Tile Giant, Pino’s, Land Rover, and many others have already upgraded to Magento 2 because they understood that a simple upgrade could change their fate.

The common thing among them was:

They did not leave things for tomorrow. An eCommerce web development company would be able to help them embrace these changes that promise long-term success.

The Upsides of Magento 2 Migration

The major reason behind the reluctance to upgrade from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is that the key business decision-makers feel that this shift would make no difference. It is like changing adjacently placed seats with no difference in the experience at all.

Which is not TRUE!

Let us have a look at some of the most important benefits of Magento 2 migration.

1. Improved Performance and Scalability

There’s no doubt that Magento 2 is superior to Magento 1 in all aspects. It’s equipped with an improved indexer that helps in increasing its query performance speed. Moreover, Magento 2 uses Varnish Cache, a prominent HTTP accelerator technology, which simplifies cache requests.

This makes it simple for more than one admin user to create and edit eCommerce product information without data conflicts in Magento 2, imagine how much time you’ll save. Magento 2 has enhanced performance and scalability because it:

• Improves web pages for faster delivery
• Boosts server response times for all website activities
• Enhances proficiency of backend operations
• Improves database flexibility and scalability to deal with peak loads

How Magento 2 Migration Reduced the Page Load Time of ‘Graham & Green’ eCommerce store by 43.5%

Graham & Green, the British furniture company, ran their , a British furniture company, ran their eCommerce operations on Magento commerce 1 for years. Their website was not responsive and did not work well on mobile devices.

But in the year 2018, they planned to embark upon a Digital Transformation journey. They decided to migrate to Magento commerce 2 to create a bespoke customer journey for ordering Made-to-Order (MTO) products like custom sofas.

Graham & Green first launched their mobile site on October 15, 2018, during the peak time of Black Friday sales. Their visitors witnessed high site speed, which improved their entire customer experience. On top of that, their average page load times were down to a staggering 43.5 percent year-over-year, making the buying experience lightning fast.

2. Enhanced Security

Magento 2 has focused on security, and subsequently, has highly secure information handling. With its primary focus on securing user details and offering a secured checkout process, an upgrade to Magento 2 will fulfill every crucial requirement of an advanced eCommerce website development.

Here’s how you will witness enhanced security when you migrate to Magento 2:

• Password: Magento 2 helps enhance password security by using SHA-256 hashing algorithms within its password management system.
• 2-Factor Authentication: Magento 2 platform offers an incredible 2-Factor Authentication extension, which gives an additional layer of protection to your business and customers.
• Dynamic Backup Plan: To further enhance the security, eCommerce store owners can have a full backup of their Magento store files by downloading them with an FTP client. This allows store owners to have an hourly offsite backup plan and downloadable backups. A backup plan guarantees that your eCommerce store doesn’t lose valuable data in case of hacks or crashes.
• Unique Admin URL: A unique admin URL of your Magento store offers a secure protection layer by making it difficult for hackers to locate it.
• Optimal Development Environment: Magento 2 makes the development procedure quicker and more straightforward with Magento DevBox Beta, another development environment option.

3. Improved Checkout Process

Magento 2 platform packs a safe and straightforward checkout for your eCommerce site. It offers an approach to recognize visitors as guests, eliminating the login or registration form required for users to continue the checkout process.

Another advantage comes in the form of displaying an active shipping rate based on a specific country, region, or postal code. In Magento 2, you can conveniently integrate any payment method into the checkout procedure.

There are several payment options available that include Paypal, Braintree, and Stripe. You can also make your own particular favored payment modules with easy integration with any merchant checkout platform.

Magento 2 checkout process comprises the order summary, so your customers can review their shipping information. These features help reduce the checkout hassle and enhance customer experience.

It even reduces the checkout time, thereby boosting your website’s conversion rate while reducing cart abandonment.

How Cabinets.com Reduced the Average Time on Checkout by 8 Sec Using Magento 2

Cabinet.com, a successful US-based company, dealing with kitchen cabinets, launched Kitchen Resource Direct, one of the first companies to sell cabinets online. They launched their brand initially on Magento Open Source and gradually shifted to Magento Commerce 1 in 2014.

However, in today’s dynamic digitized world, cabinets.com aimed to offer homeowners and professional contractors a large selection of competitively priced, customizable products. Thus, in 2017, they decided to upgrade with a Magento 2 migration service.

One of the vital results achieved with this migration was a seamless Magento commerce 2 checkout process, which reduced the average checkout time by 8 seconds.

4. Advanced Reporting

When it comes to succeeding in your eCommerce business, reporting is very crucial. The new advanced reporting features, located in Magento Admin, offer 20 reports through its web interface. This feature gives you insights into three critical areas, such as:

• Orders: the number of orders, AOV, and taxes and shipping fees collected
• Customers: the number of registered accounts
• Products: the number of products orders and which product sells best

The reporting is dynamic and real-time, offering you the metrics that you need for better management of your eCommerce business.

5. Mobile-friendly and Responsive Design

Magento 2 offers mobile-friendly and responsive designs for delivering the perfect checkout experience on a Magento eCommerce website .

The admin panel in Magento 2 is touchscreen-friendly – making your site easy to use and easy to navigate irrespective of the device you’re accessing it from.

How We Helped Legend Footwear Optimize Performance for Magento 2 eCommerce Store

We helped one of our clients, Legend Footwear, optimize performance by developing customized eCommerce solutions. This aided them in improving conversions and in reducing the bounce rate of their website.

Magento 2 Migration: Background and Challenges

Legend Footwear is a high-quality brand, which got established in the heart of London in 1992. It offers high-quality branded footwear to millions of its customers globally. They offer the latest products that are from trustworthy and famous brands including Dr. Martens, Fly London, Timberland, Nike, and so on.

When the client approached us, the website was already built on the Magento 2 platform. However, their website had a number of issues, which was spoiling the overall user experience.

To start with, the loading speed of the website was very slow on both, desktop and mobile websites, which failed to rank the website on Google. This even resulted in low-performance scores in GTMetrix.

Due to the lack of mobile responsive design, the Magento 2 eCommerce website was unable to reach mobile customers as the website was had a poor responsive design and slow loading time.

The eCommerce website was facing an indexing issue with the search engines, as the product-listing page was not well organized and up-to-date. The customers were unable to see the newly updated products on front-end catalog pages.

Also, the home page was ailing with the white screen of death (WSOD) because of coding issues with the existing Magento setup.

Due to the slow loading speed, the website was facing product catalog and image issues like non-visibility of the updated product catalog and unorganized images. The users were unable to search the products on Google SERP.

The slow checkout process consumed more of the customers’ time, thus causing shopping cart abandonment. Other issues were large catalog images resize, catalog reindexing, and URL rewrites

The main challenge that we faced while eCommerce web development process was that the client wanted us to work on the live site within their time zone, and when the traffic is high. As the Magento 2 platform was newly launched at that time, there were a few core issues such as large catalog images resize issue, catalog-reindexing issue, and URL re-writes within Magento 2.

How We Solved the Problem and Turned Challenges into an Opportunity

Our team helped them in the Magento 2 migration from version 2.1.6 to 2.1.8 by customizing themes, plugins, and resolving the existing bug issue. We helped them in many ways to resolve their website performance and speed.

Magento 2 is a fully feature-loaded platform with a flexible shopping cart system. But, it was launched with lots of issues. Our team of developers were able to add extensions with improved Magento 2 functionality to resolve core functionality issues.

• We configured the Varnish cache to increase the website speed and enhance the session storage. Also, our Magento 2 developers analyzed the reindexing problem to allow faster operation on a site.
• We reduced the number of HTTP requests on the server with efficient programming techniques and required configurations to improve the loading speed.
• We optimized the images and compressed them for less data usage and easy page loads to make it mobile-friendly.
• As 62 percent of customers prefer buying via their smartphones, we improved the performance of the website to make it more responsive.
• JS files Optimization was done to make the front-end of the eCommerce website look appealing without affecting the website speed. We optimized the JS files to resolve the errors on the checkout page by adding instant checkout process and integrated payment gateways to enhance the shopping experience.
• We even helped the Legend Footwear website to reduce the server space. This, further, improved the website performance and ran the server-level process smoothly.

Magento 2 Migration Result

The eCommerce website of Legend Footwear passed through a successful Magento 2 migration process: upgraded from version 2.1.6 to 2.1.8.

With the help of the above-given solution, the website improved on speed as well as performance. Also, the possibility of potential customers, and online sales increases by optimizing the images and database queries on the website.

Our expert Magento certified developers rebuilt their website with responsive design, keeping mobile customers in mind. This attracted an increased number of mobile users and better customer engagement.

Instant checkout features were added to the website for a smooth and fast checkout process. This reduced the checkout time by up to 80%, thereby making the customer’s experience better without leading to shopping cart abandonment.

Magento 2 is the Perfect Choice to Make

Are you planning to move your business online?

Nowadays, where customer purchasing decisions change in a split second, your shopping experience must be seamless. You need an organized online store that will grow your business in the digital space. There are several eCommerce platforms available, but Magento is the most popular one that is considered a robust and easily accessible option to help your business grow and thrive.