Moving Your Store from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS
Magento Open Source and the paid Adobe Commerce have been among the most powerful platforms for large-scale e-commerce for many years. Over time, owners of small and mid-sized stores notice that servers, upgrades and developers cost them more than their store revenue can comfortably justify.
Why do stores leave Magento?
When you migrate from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS, the Seo-Gen team does the work by hand: the catalog, categories, attributes, images, copy, meta tags and design move over under an agreed estimate. An Adobe Commerce migration follows the same order, and the system has no automatic import from Magento.
Store owners give us nearly identical reasons for moving off Magento, and almost all of them concern the ongoing cost of keeping the platform running. Four reasons come up most often in our conversations, and all of them are about money and people:
- support requires a developer who knows Magento specifically: modules, indexers, cache and the upgrade routine;
- the server has to run PHP, a database, OpenSearch, Redis or Valkey, RabbitMQ and Varnish;
- 2.4.x releases need regular upgrades, and modules have to be checked and often reworked after each one;
- stores on Magento 1 have received no security fixes since June 30, 2020.
If a store really needs all of these capabilities, the costs are justified and there is little point in moving anywhere. If the catalog is moderate and most of the budget goes on maintenance, moving to a system where hosting and updates come with the subscription takes servers and versions off the owner's plate.
End of support for Magento 1
Support for Magento 1 ended on June 30, 2020, and it ended for both editions at once: the free Community Edition and the paid Enterprise Edition. Since that date Adobe has released no bug fixes or security patches for the first version, and third-party modules for it were removed from the official Marketplace catalog that same year.
A Magento 1 store still opens and takes orders, but every new vulnerability in it stays open until a hired developer closes it. Such stores have to choose between upgrading to the second version and moving from Magento to another platform, and both options are worth costing out: Magento 1 themes and modules do not carry over to version 2 without rework.
How much does Magento 2 need to run?
For the current Magento 2.4.8 release, Adobe lists a whole set of server software in its system requirements, and someone has to look after each piece. A long list does not make Magento a bad platform, because large stores with heavy traffic genuinely need these components.
A small catalog of a few thousand products often inherits them from a previous contractor, and the store owner pays for them every month. The costs fall into two parts: the server with its software, and regular version upgrades together with the modules.
Server software per Adobe requirements
The table lists the software Adobe names in the requirements for release 2.4.8, next to what Seo-Gen CMS includes in the subscription instead. The owner of a Magento store runs all of this with their own staff or through a hired contractor.
| What the store needs | Magento 2.4.8 per Adobe requirements | Seo-Gen CMS |
|---|---|---|
| Language and web server | PHP 8.3 or 8.4, nginx or Apache | Hosting is included in the subscription |
| Database | MySQL 8.4 or MariaDB 11.4 and 11.8 | PostgreSQL on the agency's servers |
| Catalog search | OpenSearch 3 or Elasticsearch 8 | Language-aware site search |
| Cache and queues | Redis or Valkey, RabbitMQ, Varnish | The agency maintains the server side |
Each of these programs has to be updated, configured and kept compatible with the rest, so a Magento store needs its own server administrator or a contractor. In Seo-Gen CMS the agency runs all of this on its own servers, and the owner is not involved in that part of the work.
Version upgrades and modules
Adobe gives each Adobe Commerce 2.4.x release three years of standard support from its launch: for 2.4.6 it ends on August 11, 2026, and for 2.4.8 on May 31, 2028. After that date the store has to move to the next release, and such an upgrade has to be planned again and again.
With every upgrade, third-party modules have to be checked and some of them reworked for the new version, and that work is paid for separately. In Seo-Gen CMS the agency installs new system versions itself at no extra charge and repairs anything an update breaks free of charge on any plan.
What does the Seo-Gen team move from Magento by hand?
There is no automatic migration from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS: every store has its own set of attributes, modules and theme customizations, so we move it by hand under an estimate. The CSV export speeds up work on the catalog, but a specialist still checks every category and product page visually.
| What Magento has | Where it goes in Seo-Gen CMS |
|---|---|
| Category tree | Catalog categories with the same nesting |
| Products: name, description, SKU, price, availability | Product pages with the same fields |
| Product attributes | Product fields: brand, GTIN or EAN barcode, condition; variants and other attributes are agreed at the audit |
| Product images | Media library and a product gallery with zoom |
| CMS pages and blocks | Pages built from blocks in the editor |
| Meta Title and Meta Description | Title, Description and H1 for every page and language |
| Storefronts in different languages | Language versions: Russian, Ukrainian, English |
| Theme | 1:1 design: header, footer, product cards, mobile view |
Each product card in Seo-Gen CMS feeds its price, currency and stock status straight into Product and Offer structured data, taken from the fields of the card itself. Once the store has moved, its header, footer and 404 page are kept in global zones, and a new menu item or phone number is changed in one place for the entire store.
I start moving a Magento store by exporting the URL Rewrites section, because it shows every old URL the store has accumulated over years of changing keys and categories. Then I compare that list with a site crawl and with the pages that bring traffic, and only after that do I build the map. Search engines do not care about the .html suffix, so on the new site I use short URLs and put a permanent redirect on every old variant.
How does moving a store from Magento work?
The work goes in four steps, and the old Magento store keeps taking orders right up to the moment the domain switches to the new system. The timeline is set after the audit, since it hinges on how many products, attributes, modules and language storefronts the store has and how complex its theme is.
At each step the store owner sees the intermediate result and approves it before we move on to the next stage of work. This way disputed points come up at the estimate and review stages, long before launch day and the first orders on the new site.
Store audit and estimate
We get access to the Magento admin or ready-made exports and study the categories, attributes, product types, storefronts, modules and theme. In parallel we export all URLs from a site crawl and the URL Rewrites section to see how many rows the redirect map will have.
The audit ends with an estimate that spells out which Magento data moves unchanged, which blocks we rebuild and where the new store may differ from the old one. If the store needs custom development to match its Magento logic, we price it separately at UAH 600 per hour, and the owner sees that amount in advance.
Moving the catalog and content
We move categories with the same nesting, then add products: name, description, SKU, barcode, brand, price, currency and availability. Images go into the media library, where the system prepares 12 image sizes for different screens, and on the product page they are assembled into a gallery with zoom.
Category texts, Magento CMS pages and blog posts, if there was a blog, are moved without rewriting and assembled from blocks in the editor. Title and Description meta tags and the H1 heading are moved for every page and every language of the store.
1:1 design and language versions
We reproduce the store's look from the old theme: header, category menu, listing, product page, cart and footer, including the mobile version. Mobile and tablet breakpoints in Seo-Gen CMS are configurable, so the way the layout rearranges on a phone can follow the old site.
Each Magento language storefront becomes a Seo-Gen CMS language version with its own texts and meta tags. Russian, Ukrainian and English are all available, and hreflang markup links the language versions together for search engines.
Review and domain switch
Before launch we compare the new store with Magento page by page: desktop and mobile appearance, prices, availability, meta tags, forms and the cart. Then we go through the redirect map and check that every old URL with the .html suffix returns a 301 to the right page.
When the domain is switched over, a built-in assistant lists the DNS entries for your registrar, and the HTTPS certificate for the new store is created by the system. Once the store is live, the system's own audit tools hunt for duplicate pages, broken links, broken images and empty URLs, and we clear up every issue they report.
What we actually did
Dental clinic · Kyiv and Chernihiv
+44% clicks from search
A domain with no history and a site on a website builder. We built the semantic core for both cities, reworked the landing pages and built the link profile from zero. In four months: 34.8k clicks, impressions 1.32 → 1.76M, DR 0 → 41.
E-commerce · international
+96% clicks in two months
A catalog of digital 3D models. We clustered the semantics, rebuilt the hub pages and fixed duplicates and indexing errors. Google users 247 → 532, CTR 2.4% → 4%.
Medical center · Ukraine
+68.75% visibility in the first month
Narrow visibility and a small semantic core at the start. Semantics, landing page structure, metadata and internal linking, then gradual link building.
How long does a Magento migration take?
We can name the timeline for a Magento migration only after the audit, as it depends on the product count, attributes, language storefronts and theme complexity. A store with a small catalog and one storefront moves faster than a store with thousands of products and three languages.
The old Magento store keeps working all this time and takes orders right up to the domain switch. We agree the switch date with the owner in advance, taking the sales season and advertising campaigns into account.
How much does moving a store from Magento cost?
A 1:1 move of a store from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS starts at UAH 25,000, with the final figure set in the estimate once the audit is done. The cost of a Magento migration depends on the number of products and attributes, the number of language storefronts, the complexity of the theme and the size of the redirect map.
| Work or service | Price |
|---|---|
| Moving a store from Magento 1:1 | from UAH 25,000, final price per estimate |
| Custom development for store logic | UAH 600 per hour |
| “Start” subscription | from UAH 990 per month per site |
| “Business” subscription | from UAH 1,900 per month per site |
The migration is a one-off payment, while hosting, backups, system and security updates and support come with the monthly subscription. The 20% off for paying a year ahead applies to the subscription only, and the migration, hours of custom development for Magento logic and AI usage are charged in full.
Why move your store from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS?
As an alternative to Magento, Seo-Gen CMS suits stores that live on search traffic: SEO is built into the core, so Title and Description for every page and language, hreflang, canonical URLs, the sitemap, robots, Schema.org structured data and 301 redirects are there from the start, with no modules to buy separately as on Magento. The owner or the store's SEO specialist changes these settings in the admin panel personally, without waiting for a programmer.
Seo-Gen CMS is a cloud service hosted on the agency's servers, so once the store has left Magento, PHP versions, the database and the search server stop being the owner's problem. Catalog, copy and URL history remain the property of the store owner, who may ask for an export of redirects, meta tags, media files, URLs and texts at any moment for free.
Send us the address of your Magento store, and we will run an audit. The estimate will show what moves one-to-one and what it costs.
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Answers to your questions
Can a Magento store be moved automatically?
Seo-Gen CMS has no automatic import from Magento; the system's automatic import works only for sites built on WordPress. Our team moves a Magento store by hand, and exporting products to CSV speeds up work on a large catalog.
When you migrate from Magento, we start with an audit, after which the owner receives an estimate listing the scope of work. It records in advance what will move unchanged and which deviations from the original store are acceptable.
What should a Magento 1 store do?
Support for Magento 1 ended on June 30, 2020, and Adobe has not released any security patches for it since then. A Magento 1 migration to the second version means moving the data and a new theme, because the old modules and theme do not carry over.
For such stores the move to Seo-Gen CMS is done by hand under an estimate, in the same order as from Magento 2. Data export in the first version works differently, so we choose how to move the catalog at the audit.
What happens to .html URLs after the move?
URLs with the .html suffix change their form on the new site: the system writes every URL without an ending and with a trailing slash. Every old URL gets a permanent 301 redirect according to a map that we build and check before launch.
Variants of a product URL that include the category path are reduced to one product page, so each product has a single URL on the new site. Anyone following an old bookmark or an external link reaches the matching category or product in the new store.
Can orders and the customer base be moved?
Yes, Magento order history and customer records can be moved, though we only commit to it once the store has been audited. At the audit we decide what exactly is moved and in what form, and the estimate records it before work starts.
The built-in Magento export covers customers and their addresses, while orders are not among its data types. So we choose how to move old orders after studying the specific installation, and the owner sees that method in the estimate.
When is it better to stay on Magento?
Staying on Magento makes sense if the catalog is very large, wholesale clients have their own price lists and orders pass through complex B2B logic. In Seo-Gen CMS such functions are built as custom development under an estimate, and an hour of development costs UAH 600.
We calculate the development scope at the audit and show the owner the total before work starts. If the development would cost more than keeping Magento, we say so directly and advise against moving.
Moving an online store from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS makes sense when keeping the platform running costs more than its power brings in. The team moves the catalog, attributes, images, copy, meta tags and design by hand, and old .html URLs get 301 redirects according to a verified map. A Magento migration starts from UAH 25,000, the estimate shows the final figure, and if your store is better off staying on Magento, we will tell you so at the audit.
We reply within one business day. No newsletters, no “just a reminder” calls.
He will look at the site himself instead of passing it to a manager.
More on: Moving Your Store from Magento to Seo-Gen CMS
Who is the move from Magento right for, and who should stay?
We do not try to talk every Magento store owner into moving, because for some projects this platform suits them better than any simpler system. Moving to Seo-Gen CMS makes sense if a store shows at least some of the signs on this list:
- a moderate catalog, one storefront and up to three languages: Russian, Ukrainian, English;
- prices without complex rules for different customer groups;
- the store sells through search, and the owner wants to edit meta tags and copy personally;
- there is no in-house PHP developer, and a Magento contractor is hard to find;
- the store runs on Magento 1, which no longer receives updates.
Staying on Magento is the better choice if the catalog is very large, wholesale clients have their own price lists and terms, and orders pass through complex B2B logic built on custom modules. Seo-Gen CMS covers such needs through custom development priced by estimate, with an hour of work at UAH 600, and at the audit we say straight out when that total would exceed the cost of running Magento.
How are Magento URLs structured?
URLs in a Magento store follow their own rules, and they have to be analyzed before the move, otherwise the redirect map will be incomplete. Three features show up in almost every store: the .html suffix, the category path in product URLs and the filter pages of layered navigation.
We will go through each one separately, because it determines which URLs stay unchanged and which ones get a 301 redirect. Everything described below we check against the settings of the specific store, since previous contractors may have changed Magento's default behavior.
The .html suffix and category path
Magento's catalog settings include the Product URL Suffix and Category URL Suffix fields, which add an html or htm ending to product and category URLs. In Adobe's documentation examples, a product URL looks like impulse-duffle.html, and with the category path it looks like gear/bags/impulse-duffle.html.
The category path in product URLs is controlled by a separate setting, Use Categories Path for Product URLs, and by default Magento does not add it. When the setting is on, a product that sits in several categories opens at several URLs, so during the move we collect every variant and reduce them to a single URL on the new site.
On the new site every URL follows one pattern with a trailing slash, so the /bags.html category turns into /bags/. The old suffixed URL gets a permanent redirect, and a visitor arriving from an old link or bookmark lands on the same store category.
Filter pages in layered navigation
Layered navigation in Magento means the filters on a category page by price, color, material and other product attributes. Each filter selection changes the page URL, usually by adding parameters to the category URL, and a search engine can discover thousands of such combinations.
Most filter pages should stay out of the index, and in a well-configured store they are covered by a canonical URL or robots rules. At the audit we check the statistics to see whether any filter combinations brought traffic, then agree which filters the new store needs and how they look, and decide what happens to the old URLs.
The 301 redirect map
We build the redirect map from three sources: the product export with its url_key column, a crawl of the site and search statistics on pages that get traffic. Every old URL in the table has a new one next to it, and after launch each row of the map is checked against the server response code.
| Old Magento URL | Example | What happens during the move |
|---|---|---|
| Category with suffix | /gear/bags.html | 301 redirect to /gear/bags/ |
| Product without category path | /impulse-duffle.html | 301 redirect to the product page |
| Product with category path | /gear/bags/impulse-duffle.html | 301 redirect to the same product page |
| Magento CMS page | /about-us | Page is moved, URL per the map |
| Layered navigation filter | Category URL with parameters | Decision based on traffic data |
| Old URL Rewrites records | URLs after a url_key change | Pointed to the new URL without chains |
The map can still be extended after launch, since redirects are edited in the Seo-Gen CMS admin with no need to touch the server. If Magento already created permanent redirects when URL keys changed, we collect those as well, so that old links do not reach the new page through a chain of hops. The finished 301 redirect map stays with the store owner, together with the results of checking every row.
How do you export the catalog from Magento?
Magento 2 exports the main catalog with its built-in tool in CSV format, and that file becomes the basis for moving the products. Product export from Magento to CSV is started in the admin through the System menu, then Data Transfer and Export, where the required data type is chosen in the Entity Type field from this list:
- Products – products with SKUs, prices, categories, attributes and image paths;
- Advanced Pricing – extended product prices;
- Customers Main File and Customer Addresses – customers and their addresses;
- Customer Finances – customers' financial data;
- Stock Sources – product stock by source.
The product file contains url_key, meta_title and meta_description columns, and images are listed as file paths in the base_image, small_image and additional_images columns. Orders and CMS pages are not on this list, so we move pages from the live site and the admin, and we take the image files from the store's media folder.
Cart, orders and payment after the move
After the move, the store on Seo-Gen CMS runs with its own sales features: catalog and categories, product pages, cart and checkout. New orders gather in the admin, where a manager accepts them and sees them through to completion, and each order triggers an email and a Telegram message.
Customers pay for orders online right on the site, and we agree the specific payment methods with the owner at the audit stage. During a Magento migration, payment modules cannot be carried over as they are, so we list them in advance and match them against what the store actually needs.