Without a doubt, there are a lot of motivations for merchants to migrate to Magento 2, for example, enhancing website design and performance, managing stores in a more user-friendly back-end, getting regular updates, etc. However, not all Magento store owners are willing to implement Magento 2 migration despite knowing that Magento will stop supporting Magento 1 in the near future. Why? From my own survey, I found that there are several common things that make them hesitate to upgrade Magento 1 to 2.

Basically, you will have two options when it comes to the design of your Magento 2 store. First, if you choose to apply a ready-made theme from a third-party provider, it often costs from $100 to $300 to acquire the theme, plus $60-200 for the theme installation and configuration. Not yet, if you are not satisfied with some parts of the theme, you can ask the developers to customize it with certain fees.

The second solution is to develop a new design from scratch, which even costs much more. You will have to hire a web designer to craft your ideas into a PSD design, and then look for front-end web developers to build a template based on that design. In general, you will have to pay at least $2,000-3,000 to achieve your unique storefront.

How to overcome this fear?

As mentioned, there are two solutions for you. If you have a small budget, the first one is more recommended. Also, you can search for some free Magento 2 themes to minimize the cost.

You probably know that all Magento modules will become useless after being migrated to Magento 2. Therefore, you will have to re-buy all of your extensions, for Magento 2 obviously, which results in a considerable expense.

Moreover, most of the Magento 2 extensions are more expensive than those of Magento 1 (from $70-200 on average). For some complex modules (e.g.: marketplace, ERP integration,...), they even cost up to $1,000.

As a result, many store owners are not comfortable with this investment and reject Magento migration offers.

Unfortunately, there is no way to re-use any Magento 1 extensions. However, I can give you some useful tips to decrease costs for purchasing new Magento 2 modules. First and foremost, don't look for all alternatives. I guess that there might be some Magento modules installed on your site but providing little or no value. You should wipe them off the list before starting searching for Magento 2 version of those extensions. Secondly, you should buy new Magento 2 modules from the providers of your Magento 1 modules and ask them for a discount. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, why don't you try?

If you don't have in-house developers, you will need to cooperate with a professional Magento development company who offers Magento 2 migration service. They can make sure that your migration project goes on the right track and meet all of your expectations, but the cost of service would be significant. Especially, if you want to work with Magento agencies in the US or UK, your project cost might be $30,000 to $100,000.

The best solution to migrate to Magento 2 at an affordable cost is hiring Magento development firms in Asia (e.g: Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia...). On average, you just have to pay $5,000$-$15,000 for a migration project. In terms of the project quality, it depends. You should spend your time searching for prestigious companies, checking their experience and portfolios carefully.

Working with the top Asian Magento agencies like Tigren who have been delivering Magento 2 migration services since 2015 so you don't need to worry about your project quality.

As you might know, in most cases, the stores will apply new web design after migrating Magento 1 to Magento 2. The thing is that it's difficult to predict whether the end-users will love the new design or not.

Even when you create a new design that you think that it's more attractive and user-friendly than the old one, there is still a possibility that your customers don't like it. The reason is simply that they are too familiar with your previous store look and feel.

As a consequence, a certain number of customers will no longer be interested in the site, which might result in lower customer satisfaction and site conversions.

We cannot migrate the theme from Magento 1 to 2 due to the code conflicts, but we can build a new template that has... the same design as your Magento 1 website.

You just need to tell the developers that you want to maintain your existing store interface and send them the PSD of your web design, they will know what to do (if they have strong knowledge and technical experience in Magento migration, of course). By this way, you can keep the site design that your shoppers are keen on while delivering enhanced web speed and improved customer experience thanks to Magento 2.

When the stores determine to migrate to Magento 2, this decision could lead to a dramatic drop in the website traffic if the URLs are not migrated properly. Imagine that your site had a large number of URLs for products, categories, CMS pages which will be broken or changed after the migration. Then, all of your time and effort for building backlink and boosting your site ranking on SERPs in months or years became meaningless. How bad could it be?

You should apply the same URLs structure of the current site on the new Magento 2 stores. After migration, you have to use your webmaster tool to check if there are any 404 error pages throughout the site and fix those utilizing 301 redirections. Apart from it, you should work with experienced Magento developers to avoid all URLs associated risks from the beginning.

Magento data migration includes the transfer of essential data such as products, catalogs, customers and orders, and so on. Therefore, this stage is considered the most crucial part of the Magento migration process. Similar to URLs migration, you might face a partial or total loss of data if your developers don't have enough technical knowledge. Losing database assets can be manually refilled if you own a small online store. Nonetheless, for a large business, it might affect the store operation seriously.

To avoid these drawbacks when migrating data, it's a must to back up all of the data before you migrate to Magento 2. More importantly, selecting the right Magento migration service provider can minimize the risks of data loss. They will help you to decide which tools to use to guarantee painless data migration.

Migration to Magento includes data migration, theme migration, extensions migration, custom code migration, settings migration, and more. In most cases, the store owners cannot carry out this process by themselves but hiring skilled Magento 2 developers.

However, hiring the right Magento agency/ developer is not an easy task. There might be thousands of Magento development companies across the globe, but not all of them can provide you with high-quality Magento migration services. Also, you need to consider whether the prices offered by the agencies can meet your budget or not.

During the Magento 2 migration process, you will have to supervise your development team to make sure that they strictly follow your plan.

In other words, you will have to be involved in every stage of the project to build a project specification, approve project timeline, provide more details for each project requirement, make decisions when things might go wrong, test the results, etc.

In order to migrate to Magento 2 successfully, the store owners play a crucial role but they can share their burdens with their partners. For example, if the Magento agency already had an excellent team of QA and internal testing, the merchants can save a significant amount of time for checking every detail on the site, and just need to add their feedback for site improvements.

Although it might take a lot of money, time, and effort to migrate to Magento 2, you will get huge benefits after conducting the migration. To name a few:

- Improved core performance

- Faster processing and improved load times

- Improved UX for admin panel with streamlined backend

- Touch-friendly UX that is designed to be fully responsive

- Easier to customize

- Lower cost of maintenance

- Continuous updates and enhancements

- Lots of available themes and extensions

Although you might confront some challenges to migrate to Magento 2, fortunately, there are still solutions to deal with them, as mentioned in the previous sections. I highly recommend you to hire a reliable Magento 2 migration service provider that has the strong expertise to help you migrate to Magento 2 without bottlenecks, ensuring a smooth transfer, minimal downtime, and no data loss.