Magento 1 to Magento 2 Migration in 2026: The Honest Guide

Why migrate now (not later)

Magento 1 reached end-of-life in June 2020. Adobe ships no security patches, and the third-party patch services that filled the gap are winding down. For any store that takes card payments, that is the real problem: PCI DSS Requirement 6 expects vendor-supplied security patches, and an unpatched platform fails it. The longer you stay, the more you spend on custom patching, monitoring, and aging extensions — often more than the migration itself, with none of the upside.

Migration is a rebuild, not an upgrade

There is no in-place upgrade from Magento 1 to 2. The codebase, database schema, theme system, and extension architecture all changed. Treat it as four separate tracks:

Data is the part that automates well. Everything that touches presentation or behaviour is built fresh — which is also the opportunity to drop the dead weight your M1 store accumulated over the years.

Moving the data with the Data Migration Tool

The Data Migration Tool is a Composer-installed CLI that Adobe maintains. Its version must match your Magento 2 version exactly — install the tool for the same release you are migrating to:

composer require magento/data-migration-tool:<your-2.4.x-version>
bin/magento setup:upgrade

It runs in three ordered modes against config files that map M1 tables to M2:

# 1) settings: stores, websites, system config
bin/magento migrate:settings --reset config.xml

# 2) data: catalog, customers, orders, everything else
bin/magento migrate:data --reset config.xml

# 3) delta: replay changes made on M1 during the project
bin/magento migrate:delta config.xml

The tool verifies that table structures line up and logs every discrepancy. Custom M1 tables (from extensions) need explicit mapping or they abort the run — this is where most of the hands-on migration time goes. Plan for iteration: you will run migrate:data against a staging copy several times, fixing mappings, before a clean pass.

Themes, extensions, and custom code

None of your Magento 1 front end carries over. The theme is rebuilt — most teams now go straight to Hyvä for speed rather than Luma. Every extension must be re-sourced as a Magento 2 version (often a new licence) and reconfigured; there is no shim that runs M1 extensions on M2. Custom functionality is rewritten as proper M2 modules — see how to build a Magento 2 module from scratch for the modern structure.

This is the right moment to audit: list every M1 extension and custom tweak, then decide keep, replace, or drop. Stores routinely cut 30–40% of their extensions during migration because the functionality is now native in M2 or simply unused.

Cost and timeline, honestly

Agency quotes for a Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration in 2026 land roughly between $3,800 for a small catalog and $25,000+ for a large, heavily customized store, with most mid-size projects in the middle. Timelines cluster around three months once discovery, the theme rebuild, extension replacement, data passes, QA, and go-live are all counted. The variables that move the number most are catalog size, the number of custom extensions, and how much bespoke checkout or B2B logic exists.

A safe go-live plan

The cutover is where migrations go wrong. A plan that protects orders and SEO:

1. Build and test everything on a Magento 2 staging environment with a full data pass.
2. Freeze M1 customizations; only orders and customers keep flowing.
3. Run migrate:delta to replay the orders and customer changes made on M1 during the build.
4. Ship a 301 redirect map from every M1 URL to its M2 equivalent — product, category, and CMS URLs change format, and skipping this tanks rankings.
5. Cut DNS over during a low-traffic window, keep M1 read-only as a fallback, and watch order flow + search console for 48 hours.