Magento 1 to 2 Migration: What Most Agencies Get Wrong

Magento 1 reached end of life years ago, but thousands of Indian retail brands still run on it. The business case for migrating to Magento 2 is clear: better performance, PCI compliance, modern checkout, and a platform Adobe still supports. Yet most migrations fail in the same predictable ways — not because Magento 2 is hard, but because agencies treat it like a theme swap instead of a platform rebuild.

At Kevion, we've migrated mid-size retail catalogs with large SKU counts, custom extensions, and years of SEO equity built on M1 URL structures. Here's what we see go wrong repeatedly — and what to fix before you sign a migration contract. If you're weighing the move, our Magento 2 migration service breaks down how we scope it.

1. Treating URL rewrites as an afterthought

This is the single most expensive mistake. Magento 1 stores years of custom URL rewrites, category paths, and product URLs that Google has indexed. If your migration plan doesn't explicitly map and validate every rewrite before go-live, you will lose organic traffic within days — sometimes permanently.

• Export all M1 core_url_rewrite records per store view before touching the database.
• Map old request paths to new M2 URL structures — don't assume Magento's default importer handles edge cases.
• Run a crawl comparison (Screaming Frog or Sitebulb) pre- and post-migration to catch 404s.
• Keep 301 redirects live for at least 12 months; don't remove them after the launch week.

2. Assuming extensions will "just work"

Magento 1 extensions are not compatible with Magento 2. Full stop. Agencies that quote a migration without auditing every installed extension are quoting blind. Custom modules, Amasty bundles, payment gateways, shipping rules — each one needs a M2 equivalent, a rewrite, or a deliberate decision to drop it.

What a proper extension audit looks like

• Inventory every M1 module: core, community, and custom (check app/code and app/etc/modules).
• Classify each as: native M2 replacement, third-party M2 port, custom rebuild required, or deprecated.
• Identify business-critical paths — checkout, tax, inventory sync, ERP integration — and test those first.
• Budget 30–50% of total migration cost for extension work alone on stores with heavy customization.

3. Migrating data without cleaning it first

A migration is the worst time to copy ten years of bad data into a clean platform. Duplicate customers, orphaned order records, broken attribute sets, and unused product attributes all migrate perfectly — and then break your M2 admin, slow down indexing, and corrupt reports.

Clean before you migrate: deduplicate customer accounts, archive orders older than your retention policy, fix attribute set inconsistencies, and remove disabled products you haven't sold in three years. The Data Migration Tool works better when the source data is sane.

4. Ignoring performance until after launch

Magento 2 out of the box is slower than a well-tuned Magento 1 store. If your agency's plan ends at "data imported, theme applied, go live" — you're launching a slow site. Performance must be part of the migration scope:

• Redis or Valkey for session and cache storage from day one.
• Elasticsearch or OpenSearch for catalog search — the MySQL fallback doesn't scale.
• Full page cache (Varnish or Fastly) configured before launch, not after complaints.
• Image optimization pipeline — WebP/AVIF, lazy loading, proper srcset on product galleries.
• Indexer mode set to "Update on Schedule" with cron verified on production.

5. Skipping a parallel run period

Big-bang cutovers — flip the DNS on Friday night, hope for the best — cause the most downtime and the most panic. A better approach: run M2 on a staging subdomain, process test orders end-to-end, validate ERP/inventory sync, then do a final delta sync and a planned cutover window with rollback ready.

Minimum parallel run: two weeks of real order processing on staging with the same payment gateway in test mode, plus one full week of UAT with the client's operations team.

6. No post-launch monitoring plan

The first 72 hours after migration are when problems surface: payment failures, tax miscalculation, email not sending, search returning empty results. Your agency should have monitoring in place before go-live — not a "call us if something breaks" support ticket.

• Error rate alerts on checkout and payment callbacks.
• Daily crawl of top 500 URLs to catch new 404s.
• Order funnel comparison: M1 baseline vs M2 first week.
• Google Search Console coverage report reviewed daily for two weeks post-launch.

What to ask before you hire

If you're evaluating agencies for a Magento 1 to 2 migration, ask these directly:

• Show me a migration where you preserved organic traffic — what was your 404 rate at launch?
• How do you handle custom M1 extensions that have no M2 equivalent?
• What's included in your URL rewrite migration scope?
• Do you run a parallel staging period with test orders before cutover?
• Who owns performance tuning — is it in scope or a separate quote?

Planning a migration?

Kevion Technologies specializes in Magento 2 migrations, custom extensions, and B2B storefronts for Indian and international retail brands. We migrate Magento catalogs while preserving SEO structure, using staged, rollback-ready cutovers. If you're on Magento 1 and evaluating your options, we offer a free 30-minute migration audit — no sales pitch, just an honest assessment of your extension stack, data complexity, and realistic timeline.