A Magento migration is a different beast to a fresh build. There’s real data — years of orders, customer accounts, SEO equity, integrations that have evolved over time. Get it wrong and you lose customers, lose rankings, and lose revenue for months while you recover.
We’ve done a lot of Magento migrations. Magento 1 to Magento 2 is the most common (and increasingly urgent — M1 has been end-of-life since 2020). We also do Shopify and WooCommerce moves to Magento when stores outgrow those platforms, and Magento-to-Magento moves when an existing store needs to be lifted to a better-built codebase.
Why migrations go wrong (and how we avoid it)
Bad URL mapping. Magento 1 URLs and Magento 2 URLs are different by default. Without a careful 301 redirect map, you can lose 70–90% of organic search traffic overnight. We build the mapping by hand against your top-traffic URLs, and we test the redirects before launch.
Customer password loss. Magento 1 used a different password hashing algorithm. If a migration doesn’t handle this properly, every customer is forced to reset their password on first login — which a lot of them simply won’t do. We migrate the hashes so logins keep working seamlessly.
Lost order history. Customers expect to see their old orders. We migrate the lot — order numbers, line items, addresses, tracking, invoice PDFs.
Integration drift. Your ERP, your warehouse system, your shipping integrations — they’ll all need re-wiring for Magento 2. We map each integration before we start, decide what to rebuild and what to retire, and we test end-to-end on staging before going live.
Performance regression. Magento 2 should be faster than Magento 1, but a lazy migration produces a slower store. We benchmark on staging and tune until it’s faster than what it replaces.
Our migration process
We start with a paid audit of your current store — usually a week. You get a written report covering what’s on the current platform, what to migrate, what to leave behind, and what the new Magento 2 store will look like. From there we cost the project up front; no surprises.
The actual migration runs on a staging environment for at least 4–6 weeks before launch. We migrate data in cycles (typically nightly) so you can keep selling on the old store while we rebuild on the new one. Final sync happens on launch night, DNS cuts over, we monitor for the next 72 hours.