Magento 1 to Adobe Commerce Migration: What We've Learned From 100+ Projects

Every year we still get calls from merchants running Magento 1 stores that lost support years ago. The urgency is usually the same: a security scare, a hosting provider that refuses to renew, or a developer who finally admitted they can't maintain the platform anymore. Over the years we've run more than a hundred of these migrations, and the pattern of what goes wrong is remarkably consistent.

The data migration is never "just data"

Adobe's Data Migration Tool handles the mechanical part — moving orders, customers, and catalog data into Magento 2's schema. What it doesn't handle is the years of manual database patches, custom attribute sets, and one-off fixes that accumulate in any store that's been live for 5+ years. We've seen migrations stall for weeks because nobody mapped custom EAV attributes before running the tool, and the import silently drops data that doesn't fit the expected shape.

Our approach: before touching the migration tool, we audit the M1 database directly — attribute sets, custom tables, any third-party module that wrote its own schema. That audit alone usually takes 3-5 days, but it's the difference between a migration that finishes on schedule and one that's still "90% done" two months later.

Extensions: the part everyone underestimates

A typical M1 store we migrate has between 15 and 40 installed extensions. Maybe five of them have a maintained Magento 2 equivalent from the same vendor. The rest need one of three treatments: find a replacement, rebuild the functionality as a small custom module, or — more often than merchants expect — just drop the feature because it turns out nobody was using it.

We run an extension audit early, not as an afterthought. For each extension we document: what business function it serves, whether it's still needed, and whether a Magento 2 replacement exists. This turns a vague "we need everything we had before" into a scoped, budgetable list.

Performance is a design decision, not a launch-day fix

We've inherited too many Magento 2 stores that were migrated correctly from a functional standpoint but perform worse than the M1 store they replaced, because nobody configured full page cache, Redis, or Elasticsearch properly during the build — they left it for "after launch." Varnish, Redis for sessions and cache, and a properly tuned Elasticsearch index aren't optional add-ons for Adobe Commerce; they're part of the initial architecture. We configure and load-test these during staging, not after go-live.

Our migration checklist, condensed

• Full database and attribute audit before running any migration tooling
• Extension audit: replace, rebuild, or retire — decided extension by extension
• Theme rebuild rather than "port" (Magento 1 and 2 templating are different enough that porting usually costs more than rebuilding)
• Redis, Varnish, and Elasticsearch configured and load-tested in staging
• A parallel-run period where both stores are live before final cutover
• Post-launch monitoring for the first two weeks, not just the first 48 hours

If you're still running Magento 1, the risk isn't hypothetical anymore — it's a live security liability with every day that passes. We're happy to do a technical audit of your current store before you commit to a migration plan, so you know exactly what you're dealing with before a single line of code changes.