Magento is one of the biggest open-source E-commerce platform which helps in developing sites with easy and user friendly modular approach. Being the giant in Ecommerce platforms, it keeps improving the functionality and security with regular updates or upgrades, which directly help the end users but It also put significant burden to install these patches or upgrade the whole Magento in your current architecture by putting your production environment at risk due to failure or downtime, for example in minor version upgrades like upgrading your Magento 1.9.1 to Magento 1.9.2 we don’t have to take care much about environment or dependencies because in such type of upgrades changes are applied at the code end without affecting any architectural changes but If we consider the Major version upgrades like upgrading your Magento 1.9 to Magento 2.1, It affects the whole Magento Architecture, Data, functionality etc. In such upgrades we have totally new approach, new environment and new coding standards.
Our various clients have requested us to upgrade their current Magento version to new Magento 2.1 which is the new breakthrough in E-commerce Platform, While upgrading older versions to new Magento 2.1 we faced various challenges which we have listed for you
1 -: PHP Version
As most of the Magento Enthusiasts knows that Magento 1.9.2 and later supports following php versions
- PHP 5.6.x
- PHP 5.4.x
- PHP 5.5.x
But If we talk about the Magento 2.1.x It doesn’t support any of the PHP versions 5.4.x, 5.5.x and 7.1.x. Supported versions are as follows-:
- PHP 7.0.2
- PHP 7.0.4
- PHP 7.0.6–7.0.x
- PHP 5.6.5–5.6.x
If you are going to upgrade your Magento 1.9.x to Magento 2.1.x, you have to take care of php supported versions because mostly magento sites are running their magento 1.9.x on php 5.4.x or 5.5.x which is no more supported by Magento 2.1.x. As per our suggestion Its best to upgrade your PHP version to 7.0.6-7.0.x because very soon magento is going to end the support of php 5.6.x
2. MySQL Version
Database is a very important part for any application so do for Magento. Magento 1.9.x supports MySQL 5.6 (Oracle or Percona) but Magento 2.1.x supports the following versions -:
- MySQL 5.6
- Magento application version 2.1.2 and later are compatible with MySQL 5.7.
- MariaDB and Percona are compatible with Magento because we support MySQL 5.6 APIs.
So, Its better to upgrade your MySQL to version 5.7 or you can use MariaDB or Percona for better performance
3. FPC Check
Most of the E-commerce applications uses FPC (Full Page Cache) for faster response of their home pages, product pages etc. because no one wants to make their clients wait while page loads, thats why most of the Magento 1.9.x websites use various FPC modules like lestifpc to speedup their loading time or TTFB but these modules won’t work in Magento 2.1.x but the good news is Magento provide the integrated support for Varnish (http accelerator) without the need of any third party module. So, If you are going to upgrade your Magento 1.9.x to Magento 2.1.x you don’t need any third party module for caching just install the varnish and enable the varnish cache from the Magento backend for more details please check our blog
4. Data Migration
Magento provides the Data migration tool which helps you to migrate your data from Magneto older versions to Magento 2 for more details you can check our blog as well but It also have some limitations which are listed below -:
- As it says Data Migration so it only migrate your data like products, client details etc. to Magento 2 but If you have customized the database structure through third party modules according to your need on your older magento version then you have to check and change the schema of your table as well otherwise it gives you error “source field are not mapped” for more details to resolve this error check our blog
- Sometime you have to change the php configurations or apache configurations according to your need because in data migration there might be the chances of timeout, data size exceeded etc.
- You can’t migrate modules compatible with your older Magento version to your new Magento 2
After taking care of these things you can easily migrate your older Magento versions to Magento 2 but for migration of your custom modules you have to take assistance from Magento developers because there is a huge difference in the code implementation and architecture style. Magento 2 provides various new features like multiple deployment Modes (developer, Production and default), Command line interface to manage various tasks. So, Its really a worth to upgrade your Magento older versions to new powerful Magento 2.