OpenCart To Magento: A Complete Migration Guide

By LitExtension

Magento and OpenCart are two of the most powerful platforms in the eCommerce industry, both are open source and built on PHP. Both have abundant resources like add-on products to support new functions. Moreover, these 2 platforms also support multiple languages and currencies, allowing merchants to sell globally.

From Google Trend data on the number of searches for “OpenCart’’ and ‘’Magento” keyword, we can see Magento’s change in interest over time is significantly higher than OpenCart. This can tell that Magento is a more prominent platform. Therefore, it’s understandable if there is a trend where users move from OpenCart to Magento. You can see our comparison between Opencart and Magento to understand more about the two platforms.

In this article, we are going to share why it is beneficial to move your store from OpenCart to Magento and how to perform this migration.

What are the major benefits of OpenCart to Magento migration?

1. Performance

Source: Octoperf

Site loading speed is an important factor for online businesses. Almost 9 out of 10 people never come back if they experience slowness. The whole work spent on marketing and website interface can be ruined if the online shop fails to respond quickly.

OpenCart websites have an average load time of 831 milliseconds, more than 1.6 times higher than the ideal respontime recommended by Google. Whilst, Magento attained the average load time of 665 milliseconds, which is much faster than that of OpenCart.

Let’s take a look at the response time specifications of the OpenCart and Magento platforms below.

OpenCart Web Performance time

Magento Web Performance time

2. SEO and Marketing Tools

While OpenCart has many limitations in terms of SEO features. Magento offers a wealth of SEO possibilities. When it comes to metadata, you can set idea meta-titles, keywords, descriptions for products, CMS pages keywords, categories in Magento.

Moving on to the URL issue, Magento’s SEO system supports users to customize the product’s URL, allowing modification of URL suffixes, plus canonical tags for products and categories. Moreover, mobile responsiveness is fully optimized by Magento, it provides mobile-friendly checkout, responsive themes, progressive web applications, and so on. You do not need to worry about complex code usage.

3. Scalability

Poor scalability is the biggest problem that caused users to switch from OpenCart to Magento.

OpenCart is basically a lightweight platform, so it will be suitable for websites that do not search for too much traffic. When the store size grows, it will lead to an overload that cannot be solved by OpenCart.

On the other hand, Magento enables users to extend their business freely. To meet the increasing needs of users, the platform constantly improves and develops the system. Users can upgrade Magento in many ways to bring the most advanced experience. In particular, Magento brings improvements like Client-side Improvements, Page Caching, Application Enhancements, Database Improvements, New Performance Toolkit. These improvements not only make the website response time faster, but also help synchronize Order and Product Updates and many other utilities.

How to perform OpenCart to Magento Migration

Preparation

1. Backup data

Store Database is an important asset. Before the migration process, customers should back up data from OpenCart to avoid data loss.

However, with LitExtension migration service, you do not need to backup your old store database. All the data in your OpenCart store will not be modified at any cost and will only be copied to the new store.

In case you still want to backup your data, follow these steps to do it:

• Log in to your OpenCart store and go to your store backend
• Go to System → Maintenance → Backup/ Restore
• Put a tick beside the file types you want to download. Select all option-will allow you to export all data in your OpenCart store.
• Click Export

The data you export are all the data tables in the MySQL database available for download.

2. Install new Magento store

After completing the backup data, the next thing to do is to install a new store in Magento to prepare to go into operation.

• Prerequisites To Install Magento 2
• Download Magento Software Market
• Set up FTP
• Transfer Magento Archive To Your Hosted System With FileZilla
• Running Setup Wizard

Here is the link to the detailed instructions which will help you during your set up.

Data migration

And now let’s get started with the migration work! For the transfer of data from OpenCart to Magento, you can do it manually, but it will take a lot of time and effort. At LitExtension, we provide fully automated service with high accuracy while you just need to do a few simple steps.

Step 1: Fill in information

Fill in your OpenCart and Magento 2’s URLs, then download LitExtension Connector and upload it to the root folder of the OpenCart and Magento store.

This connector builds a bridge between your two stores’ database and LitExtension tool.

Set up Source Cart and Target cart

Step 2: Configure migration

You can select entities that want to migrate or you can select all the basic entities. LitExtension also supports extended options to help optimize your new store. For example, migrate customers’ passwords, this service will help you to transfer customers’ accounts and passwords from the old store to the new one, making it possible for customers to log in as soon as the new store goes into operation without encounter any trouble.

Choose entities you want to migrate

Step 3: Perform migration

It’s time to start the migration process. We recommend that you try out the FREE DEMO migration to get a handle on how the LitExtension tool works. Then, once you are satisfied with the result, you can start running FULL MIGRATION.

Full Migration is running

Once the migration is started, it will run seamlessly on the server. Therefore, there’s no need to keep your PC on while the data is being transferred. It is completely safe to turn it off! Take a break, have a cup of coffee and you’ll be notified via email when the process is completed.

Step 4: Check results after migration

After the migration process has completed, click on the “Check Result” button to check whether all data have been transferred accurately from OpenCart to Magento. If there are any errors or problems after the migration, contact the LitExtension support team as soon as possible.

Migrate extensions and custom codes

You may have some of the extensions installed in OpenCart to help you run your business and not want to lose those settings. To do that, we need to find similar applications on Magento, then we will help you with the data transfer job.

In addition, you also have functionalities created by custom code in OpenCart and want to keep them in Magento. At LitExtension, we can help you move your custom code to your new store. We will analyze and make these custom codes suitable for your new store.

Post-migration activities

Here are some post-migration steps you should take before your store can go live!

• Install new themes
• Add new extensions
• Recent data migration
• Change DNS and switch domains
• Testing

You can visit our article about recommended practices after Magento migration here for more specific instructions!

Final words

We’ve given you a detailed guide on how to migrate from Opencart to Magento using the LitExtension app. By moving from the current platform to a stronger one, you will have access to positive changes and development that will absolutely benefit your business. At LitExtension, we guarantee accuracy and the highest level of security to your data with a 30-day money-back guarantee and dedicated support. Hope you enjoy our blog and may it help you!