Magento 1 to Magento 2: A Migration, Not an Upgrade

There is a particular conversation that happens when a merchant on Magento 1 asks for an upgrade quote and hears a number meant for a rebuild. The number sounds wrong because the word "upgrade" is wrong.

Magento 1 and Magento 2 are not two versions of the same application. They share a name, a vendor lineage, and a broad set of commerce concepts. They do not share a codebase, a module architecture, a theming system, a frontend stack, or a database schema. Adobe's own tooling is honest about this: the thing you run is called the Data Migration Tool, not an upgrade command.

So the useful framing is the one you'd apply to any replatform. You are building a new store and bringing your data with you. Everything that follows is downstream of accepting that.

Where Magento 1 actually stands

Magento 1 reached end of support on June 30, 2020. Since that date Adobe has shipped no security patches for it. That is not a looming deadline; it is six years in the rear-view mirror.

Two things follow, and only one of them is the one people worry about.

The obvious one is vulnerability exposure. Magento is heavily scanned, card-skimmer campaigns against Magento 1 have been running for years, and the population of unpatched stores is well known to the people running those campaigns. Being small is not cover — automated scanning does not care who you are.

The less obvious one is compliance, and it is usually the argument that actually moves a board. PCI DSS requires critical security patches to be applied within a defined window. When no patches are issued at all, that requirement is not merely unmet, it is impossible to satisfy in principle. "We are on an unsupported platform" is not an answer that survives a QSA's question, and if you carry cyber insurance it is worth reading how your policy treats end-of-life software before you need to rely on it.

The honest counterpoint: community forks exist. OpenMage LTS runs Magento 1 on PHP 8 and installs with Composer, backporting security fixes to the codebase you already have, and there are commercial services offering something similar. These are real, actively maintained, and considerably cheaper than a rebuild. But you are trading a vendor relationship for a volunteer project, your extension ecosystem is frozen, and no new commerce features are coming. As a way to buy a planned migration two or three years of breathing room, it is genuinely defensible. As a permanent strategy for a business whose requirements are still growing, you are compounding the problem you already have.

What the Data Migration Tool covers

Adobe's Data Migration Tool handles the structured entities, and it handles them well:

That left column is genuinely useful and it is the part people fixate on, because it is the part with a tool attached. The right column is where the project lives.

The tool operates in three modes — settings, data, and delta — with the delta mode designed to capture changes that accumulate on the live Magento 1 store while you build Magento 2 alongside it. That incremental capability is what makes a low-downtime cutover possible, and it is the main reason to use the official tool rather than writing your own extractor.

Where it gets fiddly is attribute mapping. Magento 1 and Magento 2 model some things differently, and any attribute you added over a decade of trading needs an explicit decision about where it lands. On a large, old catalog this is the part that consumes the schedule, and it is not work that parallelizes well across developers.

What you are actually rebuilding

Here is the part that determines your budget.

Your theme. Magento 1 themes do not port. Magento 2's frontend is a different system entirely, and in 2026 the live question is not even Luma versus a Magento 1 theme — it is whether you build on Hyvä instead, which for a store starting fresh is usually the better answer. Either way, this is a design and frontend project, not a conversion.

Your extensions. Every Magento 1 extension has to be replaced with a Magento 2 equivalent, re-purchased, or rebuilt. Some vendors offer migration paths for their own products. Many of the extensions on a ten-year-old Magento 1 store no longer have a maintained vendor at all, and each of those is a decision: find a replacement, build the functionality, or drop it. Take that inventory early, because it is the single most common source of scope surprise.

Your custom modules. Magento 2's module architecture — dependency injection, plugins, service contracts — is different enough that custom code is rewritten rather than ported. The good news is that this is an opportunity to shed the accumulated workarounds that were only ever there to compensate for Magento 1's constraints. The bad news is that someone has to decide, module by module, what the business rule actually was.

Your integrations. ERP, PIM, POS, tax, shipping, and payment connections all reconnect against different APIs. Anything built against Magento 1's SOAP/REST layer is rebuilt against Magento 2's REST or GraphQL endpoints.

The SEO work decides whether it succeeds

This is the part that turns a technically clean migration into a commercial failure, and it is consistently under-scoped.

Magento 1 and Magento 2 do not generate URLs the same way. Category paths, product URL keys, suffix handling, and pagination parameters all differ, and unless you intervene deliberately you will change a large fraction of your indexed URLs on cutover day. Google treats that exactly as badly as it sounds.

The work, in order:

1. Crawl and export every live URL before you build anything, along with its traffic and revenue. This is your map and your priority list.
2. Map each one to its Magento 2 target. Not a pattern — an actual mapping, verified for the top few hundred URLs by traffic.
3. Implement 301 redirects with no chains. One hop, old URL to final new URL. Chains dilute the signal and are trivially avoidable if you build the map properly.
4. Preserve metadata and structured data. Titles, descriptions, canonical tags, and product schema should survive the move intact.
5. Baseline rankings and traffic a month before cutover, so that when something moves afterwards you can distinguish a migration problem from seasonality.

We have written the same warning about Shopware replatforms, because it is not a Magento-specific failure mode. It is what happens whenever a URL structure changes without a plan.

A realistic sequence

The pattern that works, and the reason the Data Migration Tool has a delta mode:

• Magento 1 stays live and trading for the entire build. You are not freezing the business for six months.
• Magento 2 is built in parallel — theme, extensions, custom modules, integrations — against an initial data migration.
• Delta runs keep the new store current with orders and customers accumulating on the old one.
• Cutover is a short window: a final delta, a DNS or load-balancer switch, redirects live, and a monitoring period where someone is actually watching.
• The Magento 1 store is archived, not deleted, for order history and any accounting obligation.

The cutover is the least interesting part if the preceding months were done properly, and a catastrophe if they were not.

What we'd do

If you are on Magento 1 today, the decision is not whether to move but whether you have accepted what moving is. The stores that struggle are the ones that scoped a data migration and discovered a rebuild in month three.

Start with the extension inventory and the URL export. Those two artifacts tell you more about cost and risk than any amount of platform comparison, and they are cheap to produce. If the total comes back larger than the business can absorb this year, a supported Magento 1 fork is a legitimate way to buy time — provided you spend that time planning the migration rather than forgetting about it again.

And if the honest conclusion is that Magento is more platform than you need now, that is a valid outcome too, and worth reading our fit test before committing. The worst version of this project is a rushed replatform onto a platform nobody chose deliberately.

Emyrix runs Magento 1 to Magento 2 migrations end to end — extension inventory, data mapping, Magento 2 development, and the URL work that protects your traffic. If you're still on Magento 1 and want the real number rather than a hopeful one, get in touch.

Magento 1 end-of-support dates and Data Migration Tool capabilities come from Adobe's documentation, which is the authoritative source and worth verifying directly for your edition.