Migration to Magento 2

The Magecloud Migration Process

Audit of extensions and modules

Our first step in any migration is to analyse your existing site to prepare a list of the modules and extensions that are currently installed. We often find that about 60% of the modules are no longer necessary, so they can be excluded from the scope of the migration.

During this step, it is also crucial that we define all third-party systems that connect to the platform.

Most of the extension vendors already have modules available for Magento 2. We strongly recommend using modules from a single vendor if at all possible. Thanks to our relationships with most of the main vendors, we can provide discount codes for many of the popular extensions.

SEO audit of existing website

We aim to preserve your current organic rankings as well as identify ranking improvement opportunities on your new platform.

We typically find that there are many issues with the indexing of an existing website that could cause problems in the future so fixing them first is the best approach. Our recommendation would be to take the time to fix any known SEO issues on your current site before you start a migration project.

We always recommend keeping meta titles and meta descriptions consistent for your Magento 2 site and would advocate the same approach for your page URLs, categories and products.

Data migration 

We carry out seamless and complete data migrations preserving all relationships between imported entities and ensuring that your current store remains operational and accessible throughout the process.

We use a variety of data migration tools and are also Cart2Cart partners – a leading data migration company that provides full-scale Magento migrations with 4 simple steps. As their partner, we can offer a 20% discount for their service.

Magento 2 technical SEO audit 

We identify all required tasks to ensure that your Magento2 migration is completed with SEO in mind. Unfortunately, many developers deploy sites with SEO as an afterthought causing ranking and technical issues that can take a lot of time to fix.

Some of our key tasks include: organising proper redirects, setting appropriate noindex,follow  and noindex,nofollow tags, implementing proper re=”nofollow” tags, setting up proper canonical tags, creating product snippets; protecting catalogue search and customer pages, defining a structured sitemap.

This is just a sample selection of the work we carry out as standard. There are many other critical tasks and technical settings on our SEO checklists that must be completed before we launch your new site.

Magento 2 go-live

Once all the work has been completed and everything is ready, we aim to switch over to the new site without any downtime. The ideal, most cost-effective scenario is to coordinate the DNS changes with Cloudflare as these can take a while to propagate to the worldwide web. Normally we recommend connecting Cloudflare to the original website in advance. It turns out that switching off the DNS via Cloudflare is quite fast so the chances of getting any issues with cached DNS settings are minimal.