Magento 2 Migration Failures: What commonly gets in the way of a successful migration to Magento 2

Introduction

Having been around for quite a while, Magento is constantly evolving and offering more and more powerful versions. It’s undeniable that Magento provides us with its ability to process and customize a wide range of products for the best shopping experience. As a result, it’s high time to migrate to Magento 2 to benefit from all the innovative features.

However, migrating data from your current platform to Magento 2 can present a huge challenge for many store owners. Fully understanding the circumstances, this article includes a list of top reasons why migrations to Magento 2 fail and provides solutions to get out in front of common challenges.

Let’s get started!

The Most Encountered Problems When you Migrate to Magento 2 

It isn’t surprising that using Magento 2 for your business is a tough nut to crack. Not only that, there are potential risks in Magento 2 migration when you don’t fully understand the platform. Below is a list of common issues that occur during and after you migrate to Magento 2.

1. Images can’t be migrated

There is no doubt that an image makes a powerful and lasting impression whenever your customers are visiting your online store. When you migrate to Magento 2, your products’ images should be brought alongside the default data. 

However, Magento 2 has a different image size requirement that might prevent you from moving your products’ images from your current platform. That’s why you should carefully read up on Magento Image Tips before taking action.

Magento accepts product images in the PNG and JPG (JPEG) formats. Keep in mind that the maximum size of each image is below 4 MB. The PNG format will display the sharpest screenshots, and supports transparent layers.

Another reason why images can’t be automatically brought over during the migration process depends on your online store’s Magento hosting server. Your server may block the migration of third-party tools by refusing your permission to import products’ images to Magento.

2. Data is missing or altered

One of the unavoidable problems occurring during the Magento migration is data loss or data incompatibility. A typical case when upgrading to Magento 2 is a “Customer Invalid Login” error which surely many merchants may meet. There may be several reasons like server changes, but in most cases, this situation is happening because of cookie problems or form key problems. 

Additionally, in order to migrate to Magento successfully, you need to check whether your current platform’s timezone is equivalent to Magento’s default timezone. Otherwise, the difference between time zones on the 2 platforms can cause discrepancies and inaccuracies in your order dates after the re-platforming.

Last but not least, I’ve seen issues where the SKU field is empty or not properly filled out before the data migration commences. When you want to create new products in Magento 2, SKU is an absolutely required field that you need to carefully fill in. Therefore, whether product SKUs are blank or are not a string due to corrupted data, this can cause data migration failures.

3. You may lose SEO ranking

SEO is one of the top priorities for many eCommerce websites. If you’ve invested in ranking your website for various keyword phrases, it’s important to understand that search engines like Google are evaluating your site on a URL by URL basis.  If your URLs change, and you don’t take the proper steps, you can lose a lot of your SEO rankings.

Here are some of the top reasons your store could attract less organic traffic and sales after a migration:

• Your URLs will be changed in accordance with your new platform’s structure.
• Some SEO issues need to be tackled for localization and multi-store views.
• Your products’ URLs might create an improper redirect chain.
• Due to HTTP and HTTPS versions, your links could be doubly indexed by search engines.

As with all parts of a migration, a bit of extra planning can save you from a lot of extra headaches. When your URLs must change, it’s important to build the proper 301 redirects so that search engines can establish that an old URL hasn’t disappeared, but has rather been changed to a new URL. 

4. Custom fields can’t be migrated

After the Magento 2 migration, another challenge that you may face relates to custom fields.  As you may know, some of Magento’s custom attributes have the setting status “Required”. If you don’t import those custom attributes, it will result in a lack of products being displayed on the front end.

To migrate to Magento 2, the custom field columns must map to existing Magento 2 table columns. If the custom field columns do not already exist in the Magento 2 table, then you can’t map the custom fields into Magento 2.

Magento 2 has a custom module for users to migrate basic data, but this module has its own default data standard. As a result, it will bring on a real headache when it comes to customizing and adjusting your custom fields to make sure they’re compatible with Magento 2’s formatting requirements.

Ideal ways to solve Magento Migration issues

The ultimate way to deal with all the Magento migration problems is by hiring a developer, using a migration tool, or both. However, it will cost a pretty penny if you choose to hire a professional web developer to manually migrate your data since experienced Magento 2 developers range from charging tens to hundreds of dollars per hour. 

Developers are your best bet when it comes to creating unique UI/UX elements for your website, or otherwise customizing your Magento 2 store, but a data migration tool will almost certainly make more sense when it comes to transferring your data to Magento 2.

Accordingly, a data migration solution from a team like LitExtension can streamline the transfer of data from your old website to your new Magento 2 store. Your data migration will be securely conducted by experienced experts at a lower, more predictable price.

While a web developer would first encounter challenges and then need to manually address them, slowing down your project and adding to your development expenses. The LitExtension solution already addresses common points of failure. For instance, with image migration failures, you can choose between 2 options from the configuration step to have your images imported into your new Magento 2 site within 2 clicks:

• Migrate Images from Products, Categories, and Blog Post Descriptions: You will be able to migrate your products’ images to the Magento 2 store. An expert will adjust your images to be compatible with Magento’s default image setup.
• Migrate Additional Images: This option allows you to transfer additional images that can show your product from different angles to your Magento store rather than just the thumbnail image.

Furthermore, if you’re worried about your page rank on Google, LitExtension has off-the-shelf solutions to help ensure your old URLs aren’t left behind in the migration process:

• Create 301 Redirects to Target Store: When selecting this option, LitExtension will automatically create 301 redirects from your Source Store’s URLs to the corresponding ones in your new Magento 2 store during the migration. As a result, you can maintain your SEO ranking and customer experience after re-platforming.
• Migrate Product and Category SEO URLs: The function allows you to migrate Product and Category URLs from your Source Store to your new Magento 2 website. The maintained URLs will help keep the SEO ranking score that you have built up for years.

Last but not least, LitExtension experts can help you migrate custom fields that were originally non-existent in your old or new platform core. These fields are important as they allow you to specify additional information about your products or pages.

How to migrate to Magento 2 seamlessly?

Let’s get straight to the A – Z instructions to migrate to Magento 2 with LitExtension.

Preparation

First and foremost, it’s necessary to backup your data before making any changes to your online store. Fortunately, there are no worries about any distortion of your data with LitExtension’s automated migration tools. They guarantee not to adjust any information in your Source store.

Yet, we still suggest you having a backup for your current store to ensure the security of your business-critical data.

Depending on your platform’s type (open-source or hosted), you can perform the backup in several ways:

Open-source eCommerce platform (WooCommerce, Magento, etc.)

• Working with a fully-managed eCommerce hosting provider: Simply confirm that your host has appropriate off-server database backups on file for you.
• Using cPanel: You will need to use the phpMyAdmin web interface to export your database. If you’re unfamiliar with how to accomplish this task, reach out to your web host for further assistance. 
• Backup from your dashboard: The fact is that nearly all the open-source platforms allow you to create a complete backup of your database and the file system. You can easily find this function from your back-end interface.

Hosted eCommerce platform (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.)

• Manual backup: Hosted platforms always have an option to get a copy of your data using CSV files.
• Through the third-party app: If you are too busy to back up your data, a tool like Rewind will be the best option for you.

Set up your Magento 2 store

The next step is to set up your new online store with Magento 2 unless you’ve already done so. To install a new Magento store, you will need to:

• Have your web host spin up a hosting environment that’s optimized for Magento 2 
• If they have not installed the latest version of Magento 2 for you, download Magento from the Adobe/Magento Website
• Set up SFTP to transfer data
• Transfer Your Magento Archive to Your Hosted System with FileZilla
• Run the Setup Wizard

You can also take a look at the video tutorial below: https://youtu.be/jSo2x9N9Swk

Migrate to Magento 2 using LitExtension tool

Step 1: Create a LitExtension account

On the LitExtension website, you can use a Gmail or Facebook account to Register or Login.

Step 2: Fill in the required information

Once you have logged in, hit the orange button labeled “Create new migration”.

Source Cart setup

Depending on your current platform type, there are different ways to set up your Source Cart:

• Open-source platform: You need to upload the connector file to create a link between your old store database and LitExtension. There will be a guidance video in the instructions section, so you can easily install and set it up yourself.
• Hosted platform:  Filling in the API (Application Programming Interface), login credentials of your store by following the instruction below.

Target Cart setup

Now, select Magento as the Target Cart type and paste its URL into the blank bar.

In case you haven’t set up your Magento store yet, you can tick the box “Try migration use LitExtension test store”.

After that, install the LitExtension Connector to set up the bridge between your Magento 2 store and LitExtension. Do this exactly the same way as your Source Store mentioned above.

Then, hit the orange button to configure your migration.

Step 3: Choose entities

You can either choose certain entities or select all to transfer all of your data to your new Magento 2 store.

To minimize errors during the migration process and extend your migration possibilities, LitExtension offers you more than 10 additional options. These include free and paid features such as: preserving product IDs on Target store, Strip HTML from category, product names, and far more.

You can also map Language, Order Status, and Customer Group together to be displayed consistently in Magento 2 Store.

Step 4: Perform Migration

After configuring your migration, hit next to perform a demo migration for limited entities or skip it and run a full migration.

• To Try The Demo: Start your demo migration with a limited number of entities from which you can picture the actual migration process.
• To Perform A Full Migration: Click the “Skip Demo Migration” button to perform a full migration immediately. LitExtension’s tool will display a report showing the number of entities you have selected.

You will receive a direct notice via email and you can check the results on the target Magento store right after the transfer process is completed.

Conclusion

To sum things up, I’ve listed many of the top reasons why businesses have experienced unsuccessful migrations to Magento 2 along with describing a much more optimal solution. If you’re planning a migration to Magento 2, whether it’s from Magento 1 or another eCommerce platform, you’re now empowered to take proactive steps to avoid critical issues that could impact your new site launch, your SEO, and other topics that are important to your business. Thanks for reading and good luck!