Magento 1 to Magento 2
migration, done properly.

Magento 1 stopped receiving security patches in June 2020. Every month a store stays on it, the risk compounds: PCI-DSS exposure, unpatchable vulnerabilities, PHP versions your host no longer wants to run, and a shrinking pool of developers willing to touch the codebase. The good news is that a migration to Magento 2 is a well-trodden path — when it is planned by someone who has walked it before. I have shipped Magento 1 to Magento 2 migrations for stores like BrandAlley and Run Auto Parts, including a 22-week replatform combining M2 and a Hyvä frontend.

• 01Fixed-price migration audit before you commit to anything
• 02URLs, SEO rankings, customers and full order history preserved
• 03Cut-over playbook with a tested rollback plan
• 04One senior engineer end-to-end — no juniors, no handoffs

Why migrate now

Magento 1 has been end-of-life for years, which means no official security patches, growing PCI compliance friction with payment providers, and extensions whose vendors have long moved on. Hosting M1 safely gets more expensive every year, and each delay makes the eventual migration harder as data grows and workarounds accumulate. Magento 2.4.x is a genuinely better platform — faster, more secure, with a modern frontend option in Hyvä — and migrating on your own schedule beats migrating after an incident.

The migration process

Every migration follows the same disciplined sequence. You see progress at each step, and nothing cuts over until it has been rehearsed.

• 01Audit — a fixed-price review of your M1 store: catalogue size, custom modules, extensions, integrations and data quality. You get a written migration plan with a real number attached.
• 02Plan — map every extension and customisation to its M2 equivalent: migrate, replace, or drop. Agree the URL strategy and redirect map so SEO equity carries over.
• 03Build — set up Magento 2.4.x, rebuild the theme (usually on Hyvä), and port the customisations that earned their keep.
• 04Data migration — customers, orders, catalogue, credit memos and reviews moved with Adobe's Data Migration Tool plus custom mapping for anything non-standard. Rehearsed against production copies until deltas run clean.
• 05Launch — a timed cut-over playbook, a final delta migration, 301 redirects live, and a rollback plan that has actually been tested.
• 06Aftercare — thirty days of post-launch support, before/after benchmarks, and handover documentation your team can operate from.

What the migration includes

• 01Full data migration: customers, order history, catalogue, CMS content
• 02URL and SEO preservation with a complete 301 redirect map
• 03Extension and custom-module audit with rebuild-or-replace recommendations
• 04Theme rebuild — Hyvä by default for Core Web Vitals that actually go green
• 05Payment, shipping and ERP integration re-wiring, PCI posture current
• 06Staging environment, CI/CD pipeline, and a tested cut-over runbook

Your data, moved without drama

Data is where migrations go wrong quietly — an order history that does not reconcile, customers who cannot log in, loyalty balances that vanish. I migrate with Adobe's Data Migration Tool as the backbone and write custom mapping for anything it does not cover: bespoke attributes, third-party module tables, subscription records. Every rehearsal run is reconciled against source counts, and the final delta migration during cut-over means you do not freeze trading for days while data moves.

Extensions and theme: rebuild what earns its keep

Magento 1 extensions do not port to Magento 2 — each one is a decision. Many are now core M2 features, some have solid M2 equivalents, and a surprising number were solving problems you no longer have. The audit produces a line-by-line verdict so you are not paying to rebuild dead weight. Your Luma-era theme does not port either, which is an opportunity: I rebuild storefronts on Hyvä, which routinely takes stores from failing Core Web Vitals to green scores — a migration and a performance upgrade in one project.

Already on Magento 2? Version upgrades too

The same discipline applies to Magento 2 upgrade services — moving stores stuck on 2.3 or early 2.4 releases to the current 2.4.x line, including PHP version jumps and security patching. Upgrades are quoted fixed or capped after a short compatibility audit, so you are not signing up for open-ended agency time and materials.