PrestaShop: a practical guide to migrating from 1.x to 8.x

Your PrestaShop 1.x store works, it brings in money, and that's exactly why you've been putting off the migration for months. The problem is that staying on an end-of-life version means giving up security updates, compatible modules and recent PHP versions. Migrating PrestaShop from 1.x to 8.x is a demanding but manageable project, as long as you tackle it in the right order: here is the path we follow.

Before the migration: inventory and cleanup

Migrating a messy store means carrying its problems with you. Before touching anything, take inventory:

• Installed modules: list the active ones and ask yourself which are still needed. Every module you drop is one less compatibility problem.
• Theme: if it's a purchased theme, check that a version for PrestaShop 8 exists; if it's custom, it has to be ported by hand to the new structure.
• Core customizations: changes made directly to PrestaShop's files (it happens more often than anyone admits) need to be identified now, because the migration wipes them out.
• Data: customers, orders, catalog, discount rules, configured carriers. Decide what has to arrive intact on the other side.

Use the migration as an opportunity to clean up: products disabled for years, test customers, deactivated modules. Everything you remove now is something you won't have to verify later.

The technical path: never in production

The rule that is not up for debate: the migration happens on a copy, never on the production store. The flow we use on the projects we handle:

1. Clone the store to a staging environment with a PHP version compatible with PrestaShop 8.
2. Run the migration on the copy, using the official upgrade tools or a clean installation plus data import, depending on the state of the source store.
3. Verify, fix, repeat until the copy is solid.
4. Only at the end do you plan the real switchover, in a low-traffic window, freezing orders and catalog changes for the duration of the operation.

On heavily customized stores we often prefer the clean-installation route: it takes more time to rebuild configurations and theme, but the result is a healthy base instead of years of layered upgrades.

The problems you will (almost certainly) run into

After several migrations, the pain points are always the same:

• Modules without a compatible version: some developers have abandoned their modules. Each one requires a decision: a replacement, custom development, or dropping the feature.
• Changed overrides and hooks: the code that extended the old PrestaShop needs to be reviewed, because the internal structure changed between major versions.
• Theme to rebuild: 1.6 themes are not compatible with recent versions. If your theme is dated, budget for it as part of the project, not as a surprise.
• URLs and SEO: if the URL structure changes, you need 301 redirects from every old address to the new one, otherwise you lose the rankings built up over the years.

An example from our portfolio: for Olma di Longhitano, a PrestaShop eCommerce for gardening materials with a custom theme we had built in 2022, in 2025 we completed a full rebrand without stopping the store. The logic is the same as a migration: all the work happens on a copy, and the final switchover takes as little time as possible.

The tests before launch

The minimum checklist before pointing the domain at the new store:

• Full purchase path: from the product page to the confirmed payment, with every active payment method.
• Shipping costs: check the rules by zone and weight with test orders; it's one of the most expensive mistakes to discover in production.
• Transactional emails: order confirmation, shipping, password recovery. Check that they go out and how they look.
• B2B area, if you have one: price lists by customer group, prices with and without VAT, orders with minimum quantities. On Propell Shop, a B2B PrestaShop eCommerce for wholesale leather goods, this part of the configuration is the heart of the store: in a B2B context, a mistake in the price lists costs you on every order.
• Redirects and sitemap: sample the old indexed URLs and verify that they respond with a 301 to the right page.

Keep the old store frozen but reachable for a few weeks: if a missing piece of data turns up, you can recover it.

If you want to migrate without risking your revenue

A PrestaShop migration done badly is paid for in lost orders and burned rankings; done well, it's the chance to start over on a clean base. We handle websites and eCommerce and have managed PrestaShop migrations and rebuilds while keeping the stores operational throughout. Write to us for a free call: we'll analyze your store and tell you what the migration involves in your specific case.