Our team at 418 has over a decade of experience with Magento upgrades and during the years we learned how to do these upgrades as painlessly as possible for our clients – Magento and Adobe Commerce merchants.
Common issues with Magento 2 upgrades
Here are some of the common issues we’ve seen many merchants that come to us encounter:
- Magento 2 throwing a blank page after upgrade
- Magento 2 throwing exceptions after upgrade
- Issues with placing an order after upgrade
- Issues with registration or log-in after upgrade
- Issues with saving products after upgrade
How much time / money does it take to properly upgrade Magento 2 / Adobe Commerce to the latest version?
The first thing to know is that not every upgrade is equally likely to cause issues.
There are minor upgrades and major upgrades. For example, if you need to upgrade from Adobe Commerce / Magento 2 Open Source version 2.4.3 to version 2.4.6+ you are going to have to upgrade the version of php by one major version, from php 7.4 to php 8.1 or 8.2.
This upgrade alone can cause large amounts of your custom code or unmaintained extensions to stop working properly.
The amount of time / money needed to upgrade it also depends on the amount of extensions and custom code that you have installed, their quality and their complexity.
Each extension and each piece of custom code adds technical debt on each upgrade as each of them will need to be upgraded as well as tested on a new version.
So generally, if you don’t have a lot of extensions and custom code, upgrade can be performed fast and cheaply, but for each extension or piece of custom code you add, you are extending the upgrade process and testing by at least a few hours and sometimes a few weeks, depending on the size and complexity of the extension or custom code in question.
Since each upgrade is different, depending on complexity of your specific set-up, there is no simple answer to how much a proper upgrade would cost, but here are some ballparks for you, assuming each store view is another language / currency, has some specifics for some markets that need to be looked at and tested as well:
| No. of extensions and custom modules | No. of store views | Hours needed (from – to) | Total cost of upgrade (assuming developers already have the website set-up and hourly rate is 60 USD |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 4-6 | From $240 to $360 |
| 10 | 1 | 54-56 | From $3,240 to $3,360 |
| 40 | 1 | 204-206 | From $12,240 to $12,360 |
| 10 | 6 | 324-336 | From $19,440 to $19,560 |
How often should one plan for the upgrade of Adobe Commerce / Magento 2 version?
Based on the release schedule in the last few years, we suggest that you plan a “major” upgrade once per year.
The patch version upgrades, which take significantly less time to upgrade and are usually just security related releases should be upgraded as soon as they become available (multiple times per year, let’s say 2-3 times on average).
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