Upgrade to Magento 2

Domain Sustainability
Market United Kingdom
Duration 2 months per website
Services Migration, development, integration, extension customization
Technologies Magento 1 → Magento 2
Team Frontend Developer, Backend Developer, Solution Architect, Project Manager, Client Relations Manager

Customer goals

Jaydee Living Ltd is a privately owned family business specializing in recycling. Being one of the industry leaders, the customer runs multiple independent brands under one umbrella, servicing suppliers and distributors of waste, and recycling products in the UK and abroad.

Five shops in a row — With a strong online presence, the company maintained 4 ecommerce stores, each running on a separate Magento 1 installation, and one store built from scratch on Magento 2.

Jan Guardian, Chief Business Development Officer @ Staylime

Aiming to enhance performance and ensure easy browsing for mobile viewers, the customer was planning to migrate to Magento 2. The decision was also driven by the fact that Magento 1 would no longer be supported by the vendor soon, so timely upgrade to Magento 2 was an essential part of Jaydee Living’s strategic roadmap.

Jaydee Living initially approached Staylime to perform an upgrade to Magento 2 of 3 stores selling recycling bins. Having analyzed the Magento migration context and customer’s needs, we proposed to reconsider some of the existing ready-made and custom Magento extensions and get rid of the obsolete ones during upgrade to Magento 2. As the project evolved, our team also developed a unique theme for the websites to enable a one-of-a-kind look and feel for Jaydee Living’s online stores. During the course of event the customer also purchased another business with yet another Magento 1-based store.

The project goals were to:

Migrate existing Magento 1 store data to Magento 2 correctly
Increase website performance and improve SEO rankings
Scale business with new stores and drive higher conversion rates
Ensure a more consistent user experience

Ok let’s go for it!

Appreciate all your patience and offers of support. I feel you have gone above and beyond and thus would like to use yourselves.

Jon Horsfield Director, Jaydee Living Ltd

Solution

Running on the latest Magento 2 version, the new Jaydee Living’s websites now boast a custom Magento theme and provide for a smooth and consistent user experience across web and mobile platforms.

We also enhanced the new stores with custom features:

Overcoming limitations of the default Magento installation, our team built a custom Tier Price extension that allows admins to easily assign custom tier price rules for products with customizable options.
The default Magento review feature was replaced with the Ekomi Reviews extension, a more effective and easy-to-use tool.

Staylime enabled the ‘Available in [qty] colors’ option, making it possible to display the number of color values on the category page.
We introduced a quick item removal feature in the mini cart to instantly delete unwanted products and bypass excessive dialog popups.

Process

Databases of 4 standalone websites were gradually subjected to migration to Magento 2. Using the Aheadworks’ Blog extension as a base, we created a script to transfer Jaydee Living’s blog content to the new platform.

To facilitate further incremental migration with no data loss, our team installed the triggers.

Development

Staylime successively delivered backends for the entire Jaydee Living’s website suite from scratch with custom functionality that catered to the needs of the customer’s business.

Before taking on development, we thoroughly revised the extensions in place and came up with a proper list of necessary modules, both custom-built and third-party, to be installed on Magento 2.

Unique theme development

Our team developed a unique Magento theme for the customer’s flagship store — Recycling Bins — to be used as an installable theme package for all other stores.

Despite the fact that the customer had doubts about developing a unique Magento design theme from scratch rather than to use a ready-made third-party theme, we convinced him of doing the former, as he could then deploy the custom theme to all 5 websites with fewer efforts given that only minor changes to the style shall be introduced. This approach allowed the customer to keep expenditures at bay while retaining all the benefits of having a custom theme on all 5 stores and being able to slightly customize the design of each store to his liking. Ultimately, the customer got:

Unique design
Improved SEO
Huge savings
High performance
High code quality

Integration

Leveraging a Magento extension, we integrated the stores with Sage Pay and PayPal gateways to provide for secure and fast payments online buyers were already used to.

Quality assurance

Thorough quality assurance was performed as part of the development phase to test out the compatibility of third-party extensions with the new Magento installation and to address potential issues, if any, in a timely fashion.

SEO audit

Our team took care of the current state of Magento SEO affairs, having meticulously migrated all the settings, URLs, and tags to the new sites.

Prior to deployment, we carried out a thorough pre-live SEO check for each website to ensure its consistency with previous versions and preserve the rankings in search engines.

Results

After a year of cooperation, the Jaydee Living’s upgrade to Magento 2 was successfully completed: our team has deployed all 5 websites to production.

The customer appraised the work Staylime did, as project implementation has unlocked a range of critical business advantages for the company:

Higher website performance and increased SERP rankings
Significantly reduced costs of further business diversification and new website implementation thanks to a reusable custom Magento theme
Better customer perception of the brand due to a consistent one-of-a-kind look and feel of the new websites
New opportunities for lead generation thanks to the custom functionality and seamless UX across different devices

Staylime continues collaborating with Jaydee Living, actively discussing and planning the next steps for further website enhancement and development.

Their accessibility and personal approach have made for an enjoyable partnership.

Staylime successfully handled a project management transition and offer attentive customer service. The new site processes orders much quicker and has received positive feedback from clients.