140,000 Products. 8 Years of Orders.
Migrated Without Losing a Single Record.
An Australian outdoor equipment retailer had been running Magento 1.9.4 since 2015. End of life was 3 years overdue. Their store held 140,000 SKUs, 86,000 customer accounts, and 312,000 historical orders. The risk of data loss kept them paralysed. Until they called us.
Three Years Past End-of-Life and Too Scared to Move
This retailer had been fully aware that Magento 1 reached end-of-life in June 2020. For three years they had deferred the migration. The reasons were understandable: their store had 140,000 active SKUs across 28 product categories, 14 custom-built extensions, a deeply modified checkout with trade account pricing, and 8 years of order history their accounts team relied on daily.
Two previous agencies had quoted the migration and walked away during discovery. The store had also accumulated significant technical debt — 47 custom code modifications made directly to core Magento files (a practice that makes upgrades enormously complex).
The final trigger was a payment gateway announcement: their payment provider would drop support for the API version used by their Magento 1 checkout in 90 days. They had no choice. They needed to migrate and needed someone who could handle the complexity.
The 5-Phase Migration Process That Made It Possible
Weeks 1–2: Full Pre-Migration Audit
Catalogued every core file modification, mapped all 14 custom extensions to M2 equivalents or native functionality, identified 4,200 URLs requiring redirect mapping, and created a complete data migration spec document. Nothing was assumed — everything was documented before a single line of code was written.
📋 Deliverable: 68-page Migration Specification DocumentWeeks 3–5: M2 Environment + Data Migration
Built clean Magento 2.4.5 environment on staging. Used Magento's official Data Migration Tool with custom scripts for the 47 core modifications. Ran initial data migration — 140,247 products, 86,412 customers, 312,847 orders. Verified record counts against M1 source on every entity type.
⏱ First full migration run: 14 hours · 3 verification passes runWeeks 6–9: Custom Extensions + Trade Pricing
Rebuilt 6 custom extensions natively in M2 (the M1 versions had no M2 equivalent). Replaced 8 others with superior M2 marketplace alternatives. Rebuilt the trade account pricing module — their most complex custom feature — using M2's native B2B shared catalogue functionality, eliminating the need for the custom code entirely.
🔧 6 extensions rebuilt · 8 replaced · Trade pricing fully functionalWeeks 10–11: SEO Migration + Performance
Mapped all 4,200 M1 URLs to their M2 equivalents and implemented 301 redirects. Migrated all meta titles, descriptions, and canonical tags. Configured Elasticsearch for product search. Achieved sub-2-second page load on staging (vs. 6.8 seconds on M1). Set up XML sitemap and resubmitted to Google Search Console.
🔍 4,200 redirects · All meta data migrated · Load time: 1.7s (from 6.8s)Week 12: Go-Live with 4-Hour Cutover Window
Ran final delta data migration to capture 12 weeks of new orders and customer registrations. Put M1 store into maintenance mode at 2am AEST Sunday. Ran final migration, switched DNS, verified all critical paths. M2 store live at 6:02am — 4 hours 2 minutes after maintenance mode activated. M1 kept on standby for 72 hours as rollback option (not needed).
✅ Go-live: 4 hours 2 minutes · Zero rollback requiredWhat Changed — Six Months After Migration
Performance & Business Impact — 6 Months Post Go-Live
Still Running Magento 1? Every Month Increases Your Risk.
Magento 1 has had no security patches since June 2020. Get a free migration assessment — we'll tell you exactly what's involved for your specific store.