In this guide (7)
- 1Why migrations from Magento are a special case
- 2The pre-migration checklist for a Magento ecommerce store
- 3The real cost of Magento, free license included
- 4The problem with versions and support
- 5How the technical migration to KeideaCMS works
- 6SEO: what changes after migrating from Magento
- 7When it's worth migrating and when to wait
Those considering leaving Magento almost always start from one of three signals: the cost of specialized developers and hosting growing more than expected, a software version that's out of support, or a catalog that has become simpler over time. In this page we look at what to export before migrating, how much it really costs to stay on Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce, and how to manage redirects and SEO without losing ranking.
Anyone who starts considering a migration from Magento almost always begins with one of these three signals: the bill for specialized developers and dedicated hosting that grows more than expected, a software version that has stopped receiving security updates, or a catalog that has become simpler over time and no longer really takes advantage of the complexity for which Magento was chosen in the first place. In this page we look at what to export before moving anything, how much it really costs to stay on Magento Open Source or switch to Adobe Commerce, and how to handle the technical and SEO migration without losing rankings.
Why migrations from Magento are a special case
Magento, now split between Magento Open Source (free) and Adobe Commerce (the paid enterprise edition), is one of the few platforms designed from the ground up for complex catalogs: configurable products with dozens of variants, custom attributes, prices differentiated by customer or channel, multiple languages and multiple currencies in the same store. As we saw in the comparison between ecommerce platforms, it is precisely this capability that explains why so many companies chose it, and why just as many are now considering leaving it.
Three characteristics make migrating from Magento technically trickier than migrating from a simpler platform:
The data model. Magento organizes the catalog using an EAV (Entity Attribute Value) structure, designed to handle unlimited attributes that differ for each product type. It's powerful, but it makes the export more complex than a simple CSV: attributes, attribute sets and relationships between parent products and variants all need to be mapped one by one to the destination structure.
The infrastructure stack. An up-to-date Magento installation requires dedicated components: a search engine (OpenSearch), an application cache (Varnish), a message queue (RabbitMQ or Valkey), plus specific versions of PHP and the database. Truly understanding what you're leaving behind requires specific technical expertise.
URL management. Magento generates product and category URLs through an internal rewrite table (url_rewrite): every redirect to the new site must be built starting from that table, not from a simple list of pages.
The pre-migration checklist for a Magento ecommerce store
Before moving anything, it's worth putting things in order. These are the steps that genuinely reduce the risk of losing data or rankings.
Export the catalog first. From the Magento panel (System > Data Transfer > Export) you can export products, categories and attributes as CSV. For catalogs with many variants, B2B price lists or integrations with a management system, as described in the article on ERP and ecommerce integration, this step requires more attention: every custom attribute and every pricing rule must be documented before switching off the source.
Export customers and orders separately. Order history and customer records must be exported with all fields (addresses, payment methods used, order status): the relationship between customer and order needs to be rebuilt in the destination system, not simply copied as a file.
Run a full scan of public URLs. A tool like Screaming Frog, cross-referenced with the export of Magento's url_rewrite table, gives the real map of all indexable pages: products, categories, static pages, any blog content.
Identify the URLs that generate traffic. In Google Search Console, export the pages sorted by impressions and clicks from the last 6-12 months: these are the ones where a missing or incorrect 301 redirect costs the most in visibility.
The real cost of Magento, free license included
Open source, in Magento's case, describes the software license, not the cost of running it. It's worth separating the two.
Magento Open Source has no license fee. But an up-to-date installation (from version 2.4.9 onwards) requires OpenSearch 3, Varnish, a message queue such as RabbitMQ or Valkey, PHP 8.4 or 8.5 and a MySQL 8.4 database or recent MariaDB: generic hosting isn't enough — you need infrastructure sized and maintained by people who know it well. On top of this come developers with specific expertise in the EAV data model, which is less common (and more expensive) than what's needed for more common platforms, plus the paid extensions required for features that other solutions include as standard. Added up over the course of a year, this is often far from the idea of free that many people start out with.
Adobe Commerce, the paid edition, adds enterprise features and managed hosting, but the license has no public price list: it's negotiated on a quote basis, depending on the ecommerce's revenue (GMV) and average order value. The most common industry estimates point to a license starting at around $22,000 a year for on-premise stores under one million dollars in revenue, going up to over $100,000 a year for larger stores, with even higher figures for the Cloud version; the total cost, including hosting, development and extensions, typically reaches 2-3 times the license cost alone. For most Italian SMEs, as also noted in the comparison between ecommerce platforms, this is a cost scale that's out of reach compared to the actual need.
On KeideaCMS the model is different by design: a fixed fee that includes infrastructure, updates and ecommerce features in the core, with no paid extensions to add to cover what's missing. You can also take a broader look at how much a company website costs and how the spending structure changes across different solutions.
The problem with versions and support
How much Magento costs isn't only an issue for those who use it with up-to-date versions: it mainly concerns those who have fallen behind with updates.
Adobe ended regular support for versions 2.4.5 and 2.4.6 on August 11, 2026. Version 2.4.9, available since May 2026, will receive support until May 31, 2029. From June 1, 2027, Adobe will suspend traffic on Cloud environments still running on versions that are no longer supported: this isn't a theoretical deadline, it's a date with a direct effect on site continuity.
An unsupported version no longer receives security patches. This is one of the most common scenarios in which an ecommerce site gets compromised without the owner noticing, sometimes for weeks, as described in the article on how to recognize a compromised site without knowing it. If you're considering a migration mainly for this reason, the priority isn't choosing the perfect platform: it's getting out of an active risk situation as quickly and safely as possible.
How the technical migration to KeideaCMS works
The migration follows a four-stage process, with the Magento store remaining online and operational until the day of the switch.
Catalog. Products, categories, attributes and variants are mapped from Magento's EAV structure to a simpler model, preserving price, SKU, images with their alt text and the SEO metadata of each product page.
Customers and orders. Order history and customer records are imported while rebuilding the relationship between the two. Passwords are never included in any export, a security measure common to any platform: customers reset them on first login, usually starting from an invitation email sent before go-live.
Redirects and staging environment. The new store is built in staging starting from the 301 redirect map derived from Magento's url_rewrite table: every URL that changes has a defined destination even before the site goes live.
Go-live and verification. The DNS change moves traffic within minutes. In the following days, the sitemap is updated on Google Search Console, reindexing is requested for the highest-traffic pages, and the Coverage section is monitored to immediately spot any unexpected 404 errors.
SEO: what changes after migrating from Magento
Magento, by default, isn't slow: it becomes slow when the stack that makes it fast (cache, search engine, message queues) isn't configured or sized correctly, which happens more often than you'd think when the hosting isn't specialized. Even faceted navigation, useful for filtering large catalogs, generates duplicate URL combinations that waste crawl budget if not managed with proper canonical and noindex settings.
After migrating to KeideaCMS, these aspects become more straightforward to control: stable URL structure, Schema.org structured data configurable for every page type, no external stack to size in order to achieve acceptable speed.
A temporary dip in visibility in the first 2-4 weeks after go-live is normal: Google needs to recrawl the site and reprocess the signals. It consistently recovers if the redirect map was built properly from the start. The signals to monitor remain the same as for any migration: 404 errors to fix, temporary drops in impressions on already-ranked pages, new pages requiring manual reindexing.
When it's worth migrating and when to wait
As with any platform change, the answer depends on what you're actually using, not on what Magento can theoretically do.
It makes sense to migrate if the cost of specialized developers and dedicated hosting is disproportionate to the real complexity of your catalog today, if you're on a version that's no longer supported and security has become a concrete risk, or if your catalog has become simpler over time and no longer truly makes use of the advanced features that had justified the initial choice.
It makes less sense, at least for now, if you have a truly large and complex catalog, with multi-price-list, B2B logic, multiple languages and multiple currencies, and an in-house technical team or a specialized agency managing it effectively: in that case Magento or Adobe Commerce may remain the most consistent solution.
If you want to understand concretely what migration would involve in your case, timelines, costs, estimated SEO impact, management of orders in progress, the starting point is an audit of your current store.
