It’s the year 2020 now and the issue of Magento migration is getting really hot. As of January, store owners have only 6 months to migrate to a new platform. There will be no more deadline extensions.
The date is final: after all support for Magento 1 is going to end. That’s a tight timeframe, especially when you don’t really know how long it will take you to complete Magento 2 migration.
We are here to answer this question. In 4 years, we’ve successfully finished 21 major migration projects and discovered quite a few patterns. First, let’s see which 3 challenges can slow you down and even become roadblocks during the migration progress. After that, we’ll look at the 4 main migration steps and why they can take so long to complete.
What Can Slow You Down: 3 Common Magento Migration Challenges
Magento migration is a complex process that requires a lot of expertise and long debugging sessions. That’s why estimating the time you need to migrate is hard if you don’t know what it involves.
Let’s see what kind of work you need to do to move to Magento 2 platform:
- build new desktop, mobile, and tablet user experience,
- create a few versions of design and implement the one you like most,
- apply all the frontend and backend changes, this includes dealing with layout and third-party extensions,
- prepare and migrate store data,
- go live and have post-migration support.
All steps of the migration can be challenging but most of the time we have to deal with 3 most common challenge types:
Architectural challenges. Magento 1 was released in March 2008. That’s 12 years ago. In software terms, that’s ages. Since then, PHP alone went through 2 major releases, new libraries and technologies have appeared and replaced what Magento 1 uses.
Magento 2 is a completely different platform. The team who released it in 2015 reworked a lot of Magento 1 codebase, creating a weird mix of old and new pieces that are extremely different from what Magento 1 is.
Compatibility challenges. Magento 2 extensions are not compatible with Magento 1 and vice versa. You can’t just copy and paste your old extension to Magento 2 and hope for the best. There are so many differences that you basically need to build a brand new extension from the ground up. As you might imagine, building a new piece of software is both time-consuming and expensive. And unless you can find the same extension at Magento Marketplace, you are out of options: you have to build a new extension.
And it gets even more complicated: the more extensions you have, the more compatibility conflicts you get. Sorting them out is a long and expensive process which involves testing, debugging, and more testing. Not fun!
Migration team challenges. Let’s face it. Magento 1 and Magento 2 are so different they might as well be two separate products. The development team reworked so many things in Magento 2 that an experienced Magento 1 developer will have to learn how to code for Magento 2 almost from 0.
This also means that it’s hard to find a competent Magento migration team. These developers need to know both Magento 1 and Magento 2 extremely well, understand how both platforms work, and where their differences are.
So a good Magento 1 or Magento 2 team might not be the best choice for a migration project because of their limited expertise. can be a challenging task.
The amount of effort during each stage is not the same, of course. You can expect to spend a 2-4 weeks working on UX development, wireframing, and UI analysis and at the same time work for 4 or 6 months on frontend and backend implementation.
Why Does It Take So Long to Migrate?
If you look at our , you can see that there are 4 major milestones you need to reach in order to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2:
- UX and layout,
- mobile/tablet/desktop design,
- frontend and backend work,
- data migration.
Milestone 1. Create New User Experience
You are going to migrate to a new store. This is a great time to experiment and improve: work on your store user experience, get and most searched for items, rework product categories, move the UI elements, and in general switch things around.
Look through the analytics to see where you need to make changes:
- rework your layout in order to improve usability,
- improve search to allow users faster access to key pages,
- boost conversions in underperforming categories,
- direct customers towards certain products or categories.
Migrations take a lot of time and effort specifically because UX analytics and changes are time-consuming and hard to predict. It takes a lot of time to find and fix UI issues, discover flaws in the sales funnel, approve and implement all the changes.
Creating a proper mobile/tablet user experience takes a lot of effort simply because of how different users interact with your store on different platforms.
Creating a proper mobile/tablet user experience takes a lot of effort simply because of how different users interact with your store on different platforms.
Why does it take so long? Because even with the minimal changes we still need to:
- create separate wireframes for mobile, tablet, and desktop layouts,
- review store structure and make changes to UI elements,
- rework navigation logic and the main menu for all 3 platforms.
In terms of raw hours, we are looking at 80-250 hours of UX team effort. The difference between the two values comes from the amount of changes you want to make. For example, it’s easy to reach the 250-hour mark when you add in other important goals:
- analyze the sales funnel and review underperforming sections,
- make optimizations for Checkout and search capabilities,
- develop mobile-first features and functionality,
- implement personalization and remarketing improvements.
Can you make it shorter? Yes, if you do your homework before you contact the development team, you can easily cut the time from 250 to 120 hours or less. The key here is to know exactly what you need, including which changes you want to make and what they are going to look like in the final version of the UX.
Milestone 2. Get a New Look
Customizable themes are cool for simple, smaller stores. They offer just the right balance between the available options and your actual needs. Just bear in mind that because of the sheer amount of customization code they can slow you down.
Customizable themes are cool for simple, smaller stores. They offer just the right balance between the available options and your actual needs. Just bear in mind that because of the sheer amount of customization code they can slow you down.
When your UX is ready, it’s time to move on to the design section. Even if you just want your new store to look the same as the old one, there’s still a lot of work to be done. You have to understand that Magento 1 and Magento 2 are extremely different platforms and it’s impossible to just move the old design to the new store without work.It takes time and effort to carefully export and then import all the graphical elements from one store to the other. One of the reasons we recommend that you create a brand new design is that the amount of effort to simply move the design and to create a new one is comparable here.
You will of course save some time if you only want to migrate without changing anything – but it’s not the best option. During the last few years eCommerce has changed a lot:
- stores get rid of bland or white backgrounds in favor of images that occupy huge parts of your screen,
- stock photos or just modest-looking images get replaced with highly recognizable photos of brands and their products,
- these images not only look good, they are designed to produce bright emotional response from the customers,
- new store design is not afraid to experiment with extremely bright colors, animations, and eye-catching styles.
Bigger images, bolder colors. Newcomers shine brighter, show off harder, and in general are not afraid to stand out from the crowd. There are still a lot of stores that have the old look but there’s no reason to be one of them.
Bigger images, bolder colors. Newcomers shine brighter, show off harder, and in general are not afraid to stand out from the crowd. There are still a lot of stores that have the old look but there’s no reason to be one of them.
So the rules have changed. Are you sure you can afford to get stuck with an old design?
Why does it take so long? Designing a new look takes time and a lot of iterations to get it right. Usually we offer at least 2 versions of your new store.
Even though that’s not a lot, creating even two separate themes is time consuming. Bear in mind that you also need to create the design for your mobile and tablet views. Expect this stage to last 80-250 hours depending on the workload.
Can you make it shorter? Yes, if you take a ready-to-use theme from Magento Marketplace or Theme Forest. Just bear in mind there are drawbacks to that approach.
These themes are highly customizable and are designed to work with a ton of different store layouts. Because of this, they tend to have a lot more code which makes your store slower. So you basically get a better deal but lose performance speed in the process.
Milestone 3. Implement Frontend and Backend Changes
This milestone will take the bulk of your migration budget. This is where you spend 336-672 hours (2-4 months worth of development time) on the following:
- find and install third-party extensions for your store,
- check if they are compatible with one another,
- create new extensions for the functionality you can’t find on Magento Marketplace,
- test how they work together and fix incompatibility issues,
- implement any other frontend and backend changes, make sure the store works well on all devices.
Frontend and backend work is all about applying the design that we developed, then ironing out the compatibility bugs, optimizing old extensions or developing new ones.
Even though it’s the longest milestone of all, it’s hard to precisely measure how much time you need to implement all frontend and backend changes. The longest migrations can last 8-9 months, sometimes more.
Why does it take so long? When we try to figure out how much time it will take to create a strong frontend and backend functionality, it all depends on what you need from the store:
- extensions take a lot of time to develop, install, and test for compatibility,
- complicated design layout requires skilled and dedicated frontend experts to apply it correctly on all versions of the store,
- Magento backend tasks depend on how many changes you need,
- you also need to figure out how to build in all the necessary integrations,
- and then optimize the store for speed and security.
Can you make it shorter? Yes. Frontend and backend development depends on the amount of third-party extensions you need to install in your store, the complexity of the Magento theme, the number of customizations and integrations.
The less customized your store is, the less time you will need to spend to migrate it. It’s completely possible to complete the backend and the frontend parts of the store in 2-3 months.
Expect to spend around 100 hours dealing with extensions and the rest of that time working on frontend layout, backend functionality, and various bug fixing.
Milestone 4. Migrate Data From the Old Store
Data migration milestone consists of five data categories that need to be moved in order to complete the migration process:
- customer data,
- product data,
- orders data,
- store settings,
- third-party extensions data.
Each of these 5 entities take about 8 hours to migrate. It all depends on the amount of custom fields that you have in them. The lower the number – the faster you can move them.
Why does it take so long? Each new custom attribute adds to the complexity of the migration. You have to manually take care of their migration process in order to correctly move them from one store to the other. The biggest challenge is how you handle your custom data. Migrating a standard account information table takes one hour tops. Moving the same amount of heavily customized data with the ability to use that customized data in the future will amount to 8 hours of work. Which brings us to 20-40 hours of moving data from Magento 1 to Magento 2.
Can you make it shorter? Yes. If you decide to leave something behind. Or if you don’t import anything and just get an empty store. Maybe you are fine with losing some data from 10 years ago, who knows. After all it’s up to you. Do you need 5-year-old Magento 1 logs? Maybe it’s cheaper to fill the store by hand. You have options here.
Is There Enough Time to Migrate to Magento 2?
Yes and no. It depends. If you start right away, you’ll be able to finish migration by June 2020. If you delay, it’s anyone’s guess how long it will take you to migrate. Anyway, keep in mind the timeframe of 4-6 months.
Depending on the complexity of your store, this is the approximate timeframe for a successful Magento migration project. Since June 2020 is the final deadline, we strongly recommend that you start your migration process right now.
If you want to learn more about the associated costs and challenges, take a look at our recent guide on and guides.
Need an expert quote on how much your own Magento store will take to migrate? Let’s to discuss details.