During our many years of experience in providing business with various Magento services, our company has repeatedly come across cases when customers can confuse the meanings of the words Migration, Update, and Upgrade and what specific services are hidden behind these names. In this brief overview, we will dispel all doubts and explain how these three services differ. Let’s get started.

What Is Magento Migration?

In a nutshell, Magento Migration is transferring the existing Magento 1 store to Magento 2. Besides that, these services can also be applied to stores based on any platform. This process is permanent because we transfer all store data to the Magento platform. Now, let’s talk about how this process goes step-by-step.

Step #1. Discovery Phase

This is the first stage and one of the most important because developers conduct a complete analysis of the existing store, its functionality, configuration, and much more. This process helps to better understand what developers will have to work with, develop optimal and effective options for migrating the store to the Magento platform, and draw up a detailed migration plan.

Step #2. Development

The next step is to develop a store for Magento 2. The main idea of this process is to transfer all the functionality, appearance, flow of the old store to the new Magento 2 platform. Besides, this stage includes setting up the hosting of the future store.

Step #3. Migration

With the help of special tools developed by the Adobe team, all data from the old store is transferred to the new Magento 2 store database. This data includes product data, data on regular customers, and much more.

Step #4. Testing and Release

The store undergoes rigorous QA testing on all user journeys to identify errors and malfunctions that should be eliminated before release. Once final polishings are done, the store is ready to go live.

What Is Magento Update or Upgrade?

Frankly speaking, these two terms are used interchangeably and mean essentially the same thing. They describe the process of updating the Magento platform itself from one version to another. Magento update or upgrade is a more straightforward process than migration as the update can also be performed by the store owner without involving an experienced development team.

Wrapping Up

As you can see, these mean two different processes. Migration is the store’s transition from one platform to Magento 2, while an update or upgrade is an update of the Magento platform itself. We hope that we have shed some light on this topic and now everything has become clearer to you. Still, if you have Magento-related questions, contact us, and our representative will answer all your migration-related questions.