CM Hair and Beauty - Migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2

Consultancy with CM Hair and Beauty.

Our team initially acted in a consultancy role with the founder and director of CM Hair and Beauty, Mark. We believe it’s vital to educate the correct people in the business with the reasons why migrating away from Magento 1 is required and the best solutions for the business going forward

Why migrating was needed.

It was vital for CM Hair and Beauty to migrate away from Magento 1 due to the end of life fast approaching. Deciding to not migrate away from Magento 1 can be business critical, including security risks, unsupported payment gateways and the potential of complete downtime for the website. Read more here.

Our team provided in depth analysis including:

– Website functionality including existing Magento 1 extensions
– Data including products, categories, customers and sales
– Existing Website front-end (UX and UI) and potential issues
– Performance analysis of existing website

The analysis allowed our team to provide an educated decision on the best solution for the new website platform. The decision was made that Magento 2 was the best approach for several reasons including:

The powerful admin features that Magento 2 offers suited the requirements

A large amount of data sets needed to be migrated to the new platform. Our team has created a data migration process which was perfect for the requirements.

Pagespeed needed vastly improving

Various extensions that needed to be migrated and these extensions are readily available on Magento 2

The Design Phase.

Our CRO team at Visionsharp analysed the performance of the website and the key funnels using Google analytics. Through this analysis, there were several key areas that needed vastly improving, especially on mobile devices. As the Magento 2 website was to be developed, this was a perfect time to redesign the website.

An in depth design phase was completed, focusing on a high converting user interface and user experience, ensuring users can easily find products using an intelligent search and quickly purchase products.

Multi-buy functionality was also designed to ensure wholesale customers can quickly add several variations of products to the cart with ultimate efficiency.

The Development.

With the design process, this ensures the finalised design was polished and ready for development. Our Magento 2 development team are heavily briefed on the designs and turn the designs into a highly functionality Magento 2 website, copying the designs perfectly.

Developing the website in-house, using best practice Magento coding techniques and structures ensured that a robust, high performance website was produced for CM Hair and Beauty.

Using all of our experience, our team at Visionsharp have created a data migration process. This process is tried and tested, with great results. All of the business critical data was migrated from the existing Magento 1 website to the new Magento 2 website. The data included:

– Products
– Categories
– Customers
– Orders
– Shipping rules
– Coupon codes

As a Magento agency, we are extremely proud of the final product that we as a team provided for CM Hair and Beauty. The new website has now been live for over a year and the performance increases have been great to see. These include

– Speed improvements of 142%.
– Load speeds of around 1.5 seconds
– Conversion rate increases of 67%
– Bounce / exit rate improvements of 49%

The website being integrated into Magento 2 has allowed CM Hair and Beauty to really push forward with their business ideas and enhanced the website with many new features.

“With the announcement that Magento 1 would no longer be supported, we had to make a decision to migrate our platform to Magento 2 as quickly and as smoothly as possible. We had to consider not only our website but also to ensure the migration would not disrupt our linked instore stock management system.

We are now two years into our relationship with Visionsharp and we are still working closely together beyond the initial migration to find the best solutions and constantly improve the website.

I’m 100% convinced we’ve found the right web developers and will be looking forward to working with these guys indefinitely.”

Mark Allsop

Director, CM Hair and Beauty.