Overview
The e-commerce market is unstoppably evolving every day and there are more and more powerful e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, OpenCart, BigCommerce, PrestaShop, etc. However, Magento is still holding the leading position with more than 771,021 worldwide customers. (buildwith.com)
Obviously, there are reasons! Understanding that merchants always want to reach the high volume sales and grow their business, Magento intelligently provides two appropriate versions. Therefore, both small-medium merchants and enterprise-level businesses can take advantage of the Magento migration.
For your information, Magento Community Edition (CE) was recently turned into Magento Open Source, it is referred to as the free e-commerce platform. Besides, Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) which was renamed into Magento Commerce is a paid version with many additional features beyond Magento CE.
After a long time staying with Magento CE, you may want to upgrade to Magento EE to enjoy more benefits. However, the question here is “Is it easy to upgrade from your Magento Community to Magento Enterprise?”
To help you clearly understand the upgrading process and find out the best way to perform the Magento upgrade, we‘ve created this article which compares the 2 methods to upgrade Magento CE to EE as well as step-by-step instructions.
Let’s get started!
Reasons why to upgrade Magento CE to EE
Before starting to discuss further the migration process from Magento CE to Magento EE, let us go through the reasons why merchants should perform this upgrade.
- Security: Magento EE version offers more robust security solutions and multiple secured payment gateways than the CE version. Moreover, it also has a regular scanning process, bug bounty programs, and external penetration testing.
- Out-of-the-box and advanced features: Besides having the same core features as Magento CE, Magento EE offers more diverse and outstanding functionalities such as customer segmentation, gifting options and add to cart by SKU. As a result, if merchants expect to grow their business quickly, upgrading to Magento EE will be their next move.
- Support: Merchants have been struggling with technical problems in the CE version since the platform does not offer support as a service. However, if they upgrade to Magento EE, they can have access to 24/7 technical support.
- Scalability: One of the reasons why store owners want to switch to Magento EE is scalability. It ensures checkout speed and facilitates order management for online shops with large numbers of orders and transactions. Also, if you receive a huge amount of traffic, it’s good to know that Magento EE is able to handle up to 3.5 million page views and 250,000 orders an hour.
- Marketing: The EE edition comes with some built-in marketing features including advanced content staging, sophisticated attribute-based customer segmentation, targeted content, abandoned cart reminder emails, etc.
After listing 5 substantial aspects above, we can say that the Magento EE edition is reasonably the next destination for those who are looking for a more robust and scalable platform to replace Magento CE. Despite the quite high license fee of Magento EE, its features become more convenient for merchants in growing a business and improving the business marketing performance.
If you want to learn more about the principal differences between Magento Community and Magento Enterprise, then feel free to take a look at our Magento CE vs Magento EE Comparison (2020) comparison article.
Now, let’s find out what ways to upgrade Magento CE to EE.
How many ways are there to upgrade Magento CE to EE?
Basically, there are 2 options to upgrade Magento CE to EE:
- Option 1: Upgrade Magento CE to EE from Magento Admin.
- Option 2: Install a fresh Magento Enterprise then move data, function and theme from Magento CE to Magento EE.
Specifically, we created this infographic below to guide you through the complete instructions of the 2 methods so that you could have an overview of the upgrade process.
In this infographic, option 1 seems to be very easy with only 3 simple steps that any merchants can conveniently follow to upgrade Magento CE to EE. However, it may cause a lot of errors after the upgrade process. Furthermore, in the Magento 2.4.0 version, Magento will remove this method. On the other hand, despite having more steps than the first one, option 2 is much simpler and can avoid all the issues.
Now, let’s dive into more details of the Magento CE to EE upgrade and analyze the pros and cons of each method specifically!
Method 1: System upgrade from Magento Admin
Moving from Magento CE to EE could be straightforward if you are familiar with Magento and have advanced technical skills. To specify, Magento offers a simple way to upgrade CE to EE version using Web Setup Wizard from the admin. Before starting to upgrade Magento CE to EE, you need to make sure 3 important below tasks are done:
Firstly, you’ve purchased the EE edition and got the authorization for Magento EE to perform the Magento upgrade.
Secondly, you must get your authentication keys in the Magento Admin.
Finally, you have to complete all the below prerequisites to prepare your environment before starting the upgrade process:
- Set up cron
- Set ulimit for the web server user
- Checklist
From there, merchants can directly perform the system upgrade following only 3 steps:
- Step 1: Log in to the Magento Admin on Magento website as an administrator
- Step 2: Click System > Web Setup Wizard
- Step 3: Select System Upgrade
Magento begins searching for core module updates immediately and also for component updates, then select Yes.
After the components are successfully found to upgrade, from the drop-down list, choose the EE version to which you want to upgrade.
After the upgrade completes:
-
- Clean the cache by clicking System > Cache Management > Flush Magento Cache or by entering the following command:
| bin/magento cache:clean |
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- Restart Varnish if you use it for page caching
| service varnish restart |
From here, you can continue your Magento upgrade process by following all the clear steps on Magento dev docs.
NOTE: After finishing the upgrade from Magento CE to EE, there may be some unpredictable errors happening. For example, you haven’t entered your authentication keys in the Magento Admin or the error shown in following screenshot.
As you may have seen, upgrading from Magento CE to EE from the Magento Admin seems to be very easy. However, it could take you a lot of time in the preparation process and you will have to face fatal problems after finishing the upgrade. Moreover, Magento is going to remove this method soon. This announcement certainly concerns you when you are planning to move your store on Magento CE to the EE version.
Don’t worry, there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel! Let’s move to the second method to see how easier and safer you can apply to upgrade Magento CE to EE.
Method 2: Import data from Magento CE to EE with LitExtension tool
Basically, this method is simpler than the previous one. Merchants only need 2 steps to upgrade their stores:
- Firstly, you have to install a fresh Magento EE store.
- Secondly, you migrate all important data from Magento CE to EE using LitExtension automated tool
To specify, merchants can also export data from the Magento CE store and manually import one by one entity to the EE store. However, this way causes a high risk of missing data and lack of connection among the databases between both Magento versions. To avoid missing entities and broken data tables, merchants must compare the compatibility of the exported data file from the source cart before importing it into the target cart, which requires advanced technical experience. So, we do not recommend this option.
So, we want to mention an optimal way to upgrade Magento CE to EE which is using LitExtension tool. We are proud to say that we have delivered 140.000+ successful migration projects and gain 99% customer satisfaction along with 214 good reviews on Trustpilot.
Currently, LitExtension is supporting the migration of all important data including products, customers, orders and other entities from and to more than 100+ shopping carts securely and accurately. With Magento, we also provide CSV files migration besides the migration method.
So, no longer waste your time, let’s jump into the Magento CE to EE migration process with LitExtension now!
First, log in or sign in your account on LitExtension website. After that, on My migration page, click the “Create new migration” button to start the migration.
Step 1: Setup carts information
Choose your source cart and also target cart as Magento in the drop-down list. Then fill the blank space with your Magento store URL and download “LitExtension’s connector” to your computer. The file “le-connector” is considered as a virtual port between your Magento database and LitExtension tool. Extract the zip file and upload the Connector file to Magento’s root folder on your server.
Step 2: Select what entities you want to migrate
LitExtension supports almost every necessary data you want to bring from Magento CE to EE. You can choose to migrate only a few or click “Select all” to migrate all of them. The supported data includes products, reviews, taxes, customers, orders, pages, blog posts and other related entities.
To help you extend your migration possibilities, LitExtension also offers some additional options. Therefore, don’t forget to select carefully the options which suit your needs and your store requirements. After that, Store Mapping, Order Status and Customer Group will be matched together to be displayed correspondingly in the new store.
Step 3: Run the migration and check result
In this step, you can try a free demo migration by clicking “Start Demo Migration”. And after that, get 5$ in your balance or skip to go straight to full migration.
Once the migration starts, it will run seamlessly on the server. Therefore, there’s no need to keep your PC on while the data transfer is in process. It is completely safe to turn it off! Take a break, have a cup of coffee and your email will receive a notification after the complete process.
Click on Check results to check whether all data was completely transferred. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact LitExtension’s technical support team to get them answered as soon as possible.
Moreover, If you don’t have time to perform the migration by yourself, All-in-one migration service was born just for you! You can easily hire our data migration experts to conduct this mission from A to Z without worrying about any issues.
Step 4: Migrate recent and updated data
You’ve just completed the data transfer with LitExtension and you’re going to set up the new store for some time. In the meanwhile, your old store still runs normally and keeps receiving new orders and customers, or you can make changes on your old store. Therefore, it’s certainly important to transfer all the new data and updates to the Target Store in order to keep it up-to-date.
LitExtension offers you 3 options that can address this concern:
- Recent Data Migration: This function enables you to automatically transfer all the new data that appear in your source store after the complete platform switch.
- Re-Migration: This option helps you to transfer everything all over again including data that has been transferred before, data that newly appear in your source store and data that has been updated
- Smart Update: It updates data which has been modified in your Source store after the migration. At the same time, any new data in your old store will be migrated to your new one. This option can solve the problem better and quicker than a re-migration.
Recap
That’s the step-by-step instruction to upgrade Magento CE to EE in 2 different ways. However, upgrading from the Magento will require a lot of time, bring several unpredictable errors to merchants. Therefore, you can avoid those inconveniences by choosing to migrate your data with LitExtension – #1 Shopping Cart Migration Solution.
Don’t hesitate to run our FREE demo migration to visualize how the process is. Also, you can contact our enthusiastic support team who are always available 24/7 to resolve all your problems about Magento Upgrade.
Thank you for visiting our blog and happy migration!
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