Magento SEO

From my experience of working on various Magento websites in the UK, EU and US, Magento is not SEO friendly out-of-the-box, and it’s important that SEO is factored as a consideration as early into a Magento build, or Magento to Magento 2 migration, to ensure technical excellence and preserve organic traffic.

Magento has become one of the most popular Ecommerce platforms and despite its complex rewrite engine, codebase, URL formations, and dynamic content, it is used by a large range of brands including Nestle, PlayStation, Beyond Retro, Burger King, Coca-Cola and Muji.

Magento boasts a number of great achievements including increasing sales and user time on site, as well as streamlining order processes. From experience this is true. However, out of the box, Magento has a number of issues.

You can read my article on common Magento technical issues in Search Engine Journal.

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It has been my experience that many “SEO Experts” just run some 3rd-party tool and spit out the results. However, Dan makes it his business to keep up with the latest information and has a deep understanding of not only SEO in general, but how it relates to Magento.

Stacy Strawn, The Silver Gallery

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Magento to Magento 2 Migrations

With support for Magento 1 ended (officially ended in November 18th 2018), a lot of businesses are making the jump to Magento 2. However, Magento 2 is not without it’s own issues — as we’ve discovered from working on a number of Magento 2 websites — so before you make the move it’s important that:

• You make a full backup of your Magento 1 store including all files, folders, and the database.
• You create a clone of your Magento 1 store and not use the live store for Magento migration process — also make sure the clone is locked down from search engines.
• Check whether your current theme(s), extensions and custom code are compatible with the Magento 2.
• Migrate the data from the cloned database of your Magento 1 store.
• Remove outdated and useless data from the database. This includes logs, recently viewed products, compared products, etc.
• Install a fresh copy of Magento 2 on the same hosting server where your Magento 1 store is located — this will make the process a little more pain-free.

In Magento’s official documentation, there are four stages to moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2, these are:

• Migrating the site theme
• Migrating the site extensions
• Customizations and custom code integration
• Data migration

Theme Migrations

Not all Magento 1 themes are compatible with Magento 2, so before embarking on the migration process it’s important to establish whether or not you need a new theme, or your existing theme reconfiguring — or buy another theme from the Magento Marketplace.

You should keep in mind that you cannot directly migrate your Magento 1 theme to Magento 2.

Extension Migrations

Extensions are key components of your Magento store and often enhance existing, and provide new features for users.

Magento 1 extensions will not work on Magento 2. You will experience severe compatibility issues while integrating Magento 1 extensions into Magento 2.

It’s recommended that you only install the essential extensions that are a) available, and b) required for your Magento store functionality — developers and the wider Magento community are still working on making Magento 2 versions for a great number of popular Magento 1 extensions.

Customization & Custom Code

Magento offers a Code Migration Toolkit that can help you port across your custom code from Magento 1 to Magento 2, and for the most part there won’t be any issues.

This stage of the Magento migration progress might take some time — as extra care and testing may be required to ensure that the custom code successfully integrates and functions as expected within Magento 2.

Data Migrations

The final stage of the migration process is moving your settings and data from your Magento 1 store to Magento 2. Magento have officially released a Data Migration Tool that helps migrate Magento store data and settings through CLI commands.

Data Migration Tool migrates the entire data from the database of Magento 1 platform to the database of Magento 2 platform based on a set of rules defined in the XML files. As of now, the Data Migration Tool only transfers data and settings.

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Are you interested in improving the performance of your Magento website in organic search? Or looking for support in migrating to Magento 2? Talk to me today about how we can make that happen.