Magento 1.3 upgrade or redirect

[DecalsBay]

Hi folks,

I have a old version of magento 1.3 that I'd like to upgrade to latest magento version.

It looks like the old 1.3 version is using an old skin template and I can't find any upgrade for this template.

I am wondering if I should upgrade everything and fix every problems and errors as a go or simply build a new magento from scratch and use 301 redirect to point each links to the corresponding products on the new site.

Either way it will be time consuming but building a new one would be much simpler. My main concern doing the redirect is to loose my search engine ranking and referencing.

What do you guys think? What would be best in terms of time, difficulty and referencing. I am looking for a smooth transition with minimum damage.

Thanks

[Mukesh Tiwari]

Hi @DecalsBay

As per my personal opinion you should develop you site from scratch. As Magento 1.3 is very old version of Magento. The latest version of Magento 1x series is Magento 1.9.2.2. Recently Magento has also released Magento 2.0 which has complete new restructuring of  the  code and other technologies. (NOTE: You can not upgrade directly to Magento 2.0 from 1x version)

If you want to develop your site on Magento 2.0 I personally suggest to wait for next 6 months from now so that will have extensions available easily.As well as you will find Magento 2 developers easily.

Any upgrade does not fix any preexisting issues automatically, you have to fix those manually.Because of upgrade also some issues arise that also has to be fixed.

For SEO ranking before launching your site you must get you site audited for SEO ranking  and SEO improvements.You can retain the url  same using rewrites. 

Try to be updated with time it makes upgrades easier. (Note :  Magento does not release any patch for 1.3 version).

Lets see what other community members suggest.

Thanks

[DecalsBay]

Sounds great!! Thanks for your input. Pretty much what I was hoping for. I'll probably go with the new 2.0. Thanks again.